BYZANTINE ART - BYZANTINE, ART.
Of the civilization that developed in the Eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople, between the 6th and 15th centuries, the artistic expression was undoubtedly the highest and most refined. It was the visual language of a courtly society that, together with the forms of late Roman monarchical ceremonial, perpetuated and transmitted uninterruptedly the formal and iconographic heritage of early Christianity.
The problem of the origins of Byzantine art is one of the most debated and controversial in the entire history of art; yet the reasons for such critical unease may lie in a misunderstanding arising from the very formulation of the problem, which appears largely illegitimate. Indeed, Byzantine artistic culture did not, properly speaking, have origins: its specific character was from the outset that of a fully refined maturity, almost a senescence. It fixed in a centuries-old tradition the most cultivated and courtly aspect of late Roman and early Christian art—that is, not Hellenistic art, as some scholars (Ainalov, Morey, the Princeton school) maintain, since this had long since been absorbed into the *ars una* of the Roman Empire; nor, as others (Strzygowski, Duthuit, the French school) would have it, from Oriental art, which, in the sense relevant here, was merely a provincial aspect of Greco-Roman art; nor even from Roman art in the strict sense, as 19th-century archaeology believed; rather, it derived from late Roman art, which, while—necessarily—incorporating all the strands of the ancient Greco-Roman tradition with its Orientalist veins, was something profoundly different from them all. It was precisely within this cosmopolitan culture of the vast empire unified by Rome that, especially from the 3rd century onward, the "principles" of early Christian art took hold—principles quite distinct from both the plastic vision of the Greeks and the illusionistic vision of the Romans—and these principles, once received in Constantinople, remained the foundation of Byzantine artistic vision throughout its history, while the barbarian West distanced itself from them and developed medieval art (Wickhoff, Riegl, Schlosser, Sas-Zaloziecky, Bettini). A further proof of this is found in the very millennial history of Byzantine art, which, over the centuries, seemed not to crystallize in variable forms a renewing creative capacity, but rather to dedicate itself to the exploitation and refinement of a formal heritage already fully established from the beginning.
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**I. ARCHITECTURE.** From the founding of Constantinople (330) to the age of Justinian (6th century), Byzantine architecture did not yet display truly distinctive features distinguishing it from that of other major cities in the eastern part of the Empire.
Though little remains of it in the capital, we find there the fundamental buildings, now widespread in similar forms, of early Christian worship: for the liturgical assembly, Greco-Roman basilicas (longitudinal halls divided into naves by colonnades and covered with trussed roofs—such as Hagia Sophia, Hagia Irene, etc.; the only one still extant is that of St. John Stoudios—now *Mirche Molla Cami*—founded in 463); *martyria*, typically centrally planned, for the veneration of martyrs, saints, relics, and sacred sites; and baptisteries, usually circular or polygonal in plan. A distinguishing feature, compared to analogous early Christian buildings in the western part of the Empire, is that in this period, both in Constantinople and throughout the Levant, there was a reluctance to use vaults and especially domes, which were generally replaced by wooden roofs even in centrally planned buildings. This was due to the persistence here, unlike in the West, of Hellenistic tastes that resisted the final achievements of Roman vaulted and domed architecture, preventing it from reaching the extreme maturity seen in contemporary Western monuments such as San Lorenzo in Milan and San Vitale in Ravenna (Zaloziecky, Bettini). It was only with Justinian and his attempt, in a final effort to unify the Empire, to reconnect with the culture of its motherland, Rome, that Constantinople’s architecture decisively adopted and embraced the Western Roman constructional syntax and spread it throughout the eastern provinces. After the Nika riots of 532, which destroyed the finest buildings in the capital, Justinian, with the help of the two great architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, rebuilt the city in more genuinely late Roman forms, particularly with regard to roofing, which from then on became almost exclusively vaulted and domed, even in religious architecture. This was advised both by the recent experience of the extreme flammability of trussed roofs in fires and by the symbolic intention that, in the 6th century in the East, invested the very form of the Christian temple. The Greco-Roman basilica, which had hitherto reigned unchallenged, was then replaced—even for ordinary Eucharistic worship—by the centrally planned, domed temple, which until then had been used almost exclusively for *martyria*, albeit without a true dome.
This preference, undoubtedly deliberate and later systematized in Byzantine architecture until its decline—inherited by the Greek-Slavic architecture that derived from it—was driven both by the evolution of the cult of relics in the East and the influence of the *martyria* of the Holy Land, and above all by the spread, precisely in the 6th century, of the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, which led to the recognition in the martyrial sanctuary type (essentially a cube surmounted by a hemisphere) the image of the cosmos (Grabar). Indeed, it is from this moment that the Byzantine church building becomes, in both its architectural form and its pictorial decoration—whether mosaic or fresco—a figure of God and of His work of salvation in the world. This explains the characteristic "inversion" we observe in the architecture of the eastern provinces compared to Western models throughout the Middle Ages. While in the West, which had itself created and developed centrally planned, domed buildings, the dominant "type" of church for liturgical assembly remained the ancient pre-Christian basilica with a longitudinal plan, the Christian East, due to the aforementioned precise symbolic intention, adopted, made its own, and transmitted through the centuries the domed, centrally planned architectural module, even though it was not originally its own.
The masterpiece of this new Byzantine basilican architecture is Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, built for Justinian in five years (532–37) by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus.
The great church, even in its dedication (Divine Wisdom), attests to the "pseudo-Areopagitic" concept it was meant to embody. From an architectural standpoint, it is, together with San Vitale in Ravenna, the highest achievement of late Roman building art.
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**BYZANTINE ART - David Playing the Harp.**
**By courtesy of Dr. B. Deganbarri**
**BYZANTINE ART - David Playing the Harp.**
**Illuminated Psalter for a Byzantine Emperor of the 12th Century.**
**Vatican Library, cod. Barb. gr. 372.**
Unlike all other ancient architectures, particularly the Greek and Hellenistic, Roman architecture had founded its expression on the internal space of the building: the typical Roman monument is the pantheon, formed by a block of internal space defined by a continuous and unitary cylindrical wall, culminating in elevation with a dome. This spatial form of the interior persists even in late Roman architecture, in which, however, the block of central space is no longer defined by a solid wall, but by a perforated wall, surrounded in turn by smaller spaces (niches, ambulatories) and thus transformed into an optical, chiaroscuro network (e.g., the "Temple of Minerva Medica," S. Costanza, S. Lorenzo in Milan, S. Vitale in Ravenna). On such a wall, dissolved into color, a coherent decoration can only be chromatic: hence, in the context of late Roman buildings, sculpture (capitals, friezes, transennae, etc.) becomes a kind of marble lace devoid of any plastic quality, and painting becomes an absolutely chromatic decoration (mosaics).
In Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, this refined architectural and pictorial language was employed to express, with unparalleled grandeur and confidence, the Christian and universal romantic sense of Justinianic culture, interpreted through the personal genius of the great artist Antemius. Such a convergence of cultural and artistic motivations has never been repeated, which explains why nothing ever built in the Eastern Middle Ages could equal the fullness and coherence of expression of this singular monument: today, freed from the mutilations that had obscured its meaning when the church was converted into a mosque, with its splendid mosaics reappearing from beneath the Islamic plaster, it unfolds before us as one of the supreme expressions of all art. Hagia Sophia dominates the history of Byzantine architecture, yet it remains an exceptional building. The symbolic concept of the church, understood as a mirror of the divine creation of the world, persists in the art of Constantinople, but it is realized in less grandiose forms, though perhaps more meticulously coherent. In Justinian’s time, plans still retain a certain Paleo-Christian variety: alongside Hagia Sophia, there rose the church of the Holy Apostles in the form of a free cross (obtained by the intersection of two naves of roughly equal length, covered by a domed lantern over the central square and by four blind domes over the arms, a veritable martyrium that housed imperial burials; now vanished, but replicated in its time at S. Giovanni in Ephesus and later echoed in S. Marco in Venice); the church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus (an octagon inserted into a quadrangular perimeter: a building still extant, though converted into a mosque, which reflects, even in the form of its low and depressed dome, a type of Roman mausoleum a century older); the church of Hagia Irene (a Latin-cross basilica with a dome; now a Turkish military museum), etc. But after the 9th century, that is, after the crisis of Iconoclasm, which caused a rupture in the history of Byzantine civilization, particularly in its art, the art that was rebuilt in Byzantium under the Macedonian dynasty was now detached from its late Roman and Paleo-Christian roots and assumed more "national" forms, less Roman in grandeur, pervaded by a nostalgic aspiration toward the impossible resurrection of the great Hellenic past. This was not, of course, a true neo-Hellenism: a cursory reflection on the fact that classical Greek art was the most fully plastic of all others, while Byzantine art was, with almost equal absoluteness, a chromatic art, would suffice to expunge this notion from the vocabulary of any concrete history or criticism. And if in the sculpture and painting of the Macedonian, Comnenian, and finally Palaiologan dynasties there resurface, albeit reduced to shadowy colorless figures, some echoes of Greek art, Byzantine architecture remained, throughout the period from the restoration of images to the fall of Constantinople (842–1453), always tied to Roman constructional syntax. Yet its spaces underwent a kind of restructuring: the spirit recoiled, losing its creative vigor. The creation of this period is the typical Byzantine church, the inscribed cross, derived from one of the many forms of early Christian cruciform martyria. Generally much smaller than Hagia Sophia and the other great Justinianic temples, this type of church restricts and articulates the still Roman-like vast spatial expansion of the latter. The dome, over the crossing of the naves, is no longer the vast and airy vault of Hagia Sophia: reduced in size, raised on an ever taller and articulated drum, it has become a nearly detached globular form, where the figure of space tends to assume, in a Hellenic manner, an almost plastic value. The thrust of the dome is transmitted to the side walls through barrel vaults that extend the four arches supporting it, and externally outline the Greek cross. This late Roman-derived external discharge allows the piers, which in earlier structures bore the weight of the great arches at the crossing, to be thinned to the extreme or even replaced by slender, elegant columns. The result is a composite spatial form in which each bay is distinctly defined and coordinated around the central domed block, with the same pseudo-plastic sense with which, for example, a figure in a mosaic from Daphni is set against its golden background. To this arrangement, with minor variations, belong in Constantinople the Birdrum Giamia (Myrelaion of Romanos Lekapenos, 920–44), the Kilisse Giamia, the Kahrie Giamia (S. Saviour in Chora, 10th–12th c.), the Pantokrator (1126–36), etc.; the first and most famous example of a church of this type had been the Nea of Basil I, now vanished. The Constantinopolitan model was followed especially in Thessalonica, which at this time was the "second capital of the Empire": this is recognizable, despite local variations in decoration, in the Church of the Acheiropoietos (1028), in Hagios Panteleimon (12th c.), in the Holy Apostles (13th c.), etc. The Palaiologan restoration period, which followed the Latin conquest (1261) and lasted until the fall of the capital into Turkish hands (1453), brought nothing substantially new to the art of Constantinople, except an accentuation of those decorative preciosities and exotic restlessness that had already appeared in the Comnenian era. In architecture, the "inscribed cross" module always dominates, its space ever more removed from the vast Roman expansion of the origins. The domes shrink in diameter and rise higher: reduced almost to lanterns, they withdraw from the image of the church’s internal space to assume a purely, at times whimsically, ornamental value: e.g., the Fetiye Giamia (Virgin Pammakaristos), etc. In Byzantine medieval architecture, the Constantinopolitan school is often contrasted with a "Greek school" (Millet), where the "inscribed cross" has a more acute angle (churches of Attica) and where longitudinal basilicas with vaults are also present, resembling in some ways the Romanesque basilicas of the West (Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus, Crete, Cyprus). Especially in the final period and in the post-Byzantine era, provincial subgroups can be discerned, in which the derivation from
Constantinopolitan Architecture
Various influences converge in Constantinopolitan architecture, producing interesting decorative variety but little structural or architectural coherence (Serbia, Romania, Russia, etc.). A group of particular interest consists of the churches of the monasteries on Mount Athos (Laura, founded in 963; Vatopedi, 11th century; Chilandar, 1197, etc.) and of the Meteora in Thessaly: always of the "inscribed cross" type, but with the addition of two apses at the ends of the lateral arms, so as to form a trefoil plan. Very little remains of civil architecture monuments.
From the Justinianic period, known as the "first golden age" of Byzantine architecture, the grandiose civil buildings—restored or erected by Justinus—such as the Sacred Palace, the Zeuxippus Baths, the Augustan Forum with the bronze statue of the emperor, etc., have disappeared; of the Great Palace, excavations are now uncovering part of the mosaic pavement. These were buildings entirely Roman in character. Remaining as testimony to the skill of those builders are the immense cisterns known as Jerebatan Serai (Sunken Palace) and Binbir Derek (The Thousand and One Columns), with their countless vaults supported by forests of columns; and the remains of the palace known as Hormisdas on the Sea of Marmara. Also from the "second golden age" (reigns of the Macedonian and Comnenian emperors), much is lost, but what remains is highly picturesque for its polychrome façade of alternating marbles and bricks arranged in geometric patterns: the palace known as Tekfur Serai (probably a pavilion of the imperial palace of Blachernae), in Constantinople. Here, as in Thessalonica and in three other major centers of the Empire, long stretches of the city walls and aqueducts also remain. From the last period, outside the capital, of particular interest is the dead city of Mistra in the Peloponnese: besides the numerous churches adorned with magnificent frescoes (Perivleptos, Metropolitan, Pandanassa, Vrontochion), one can see, at the summit of the picturesque hill, the grand remains of the immense palace of the Despots.
Sculpture and Minor Arts
The process of the increasing decline of sculpture, especially statuary—which had already begun in Late Roman and Paleochristian art as a fully plastic expression—is carried forward by Byzantine art: so much so that it is not surprising, as some (Duthuit) have noted, that statuary almost completely disappears, and sculpture is reduced to architectural decoration or to the delicate modeling of precious marble, ivory, and metal reliefs. This is a perfectly coherent process; to understand its meaning, however, it is not helpful to resort to the myth of the influences of a romantic Orient, but it is necessary to keep in mind the particular form assumed, already in the Late Roman and Proto-Christian periods, by architectural spaces: which, as has been said, are no longer bounded by solid walls of pronounced materiality, but by thin partitions that, in order to be transformed into continuous seating crowns, are reduced to an alternation of solids and voids, i.e., of light and shadow: to a definition, therefore, no longer of plastic value but of chiaroscuro value. For this reason, sculptural decoration, in order to be consistent with this dematerialized spatial form, must abandon any plastic relief and translate itself into a flat chiaroscuro rendering, which often achieves results of extreme preciosity.
In Hagia Sophia, the vast interior space is a dense colored fluid, tinted not only by the light or polychrome marbles of the columns, the floor, and the panels that line the lower part of the church, but also by the flashing chiaroscuro of the capitals, cornices, transennae, and parapets: carved in relief with crosses, monograms, or vegetal ornaments, but more often pierced. A splendid marble lacework, with continuous palm tendrils or minute acanthus leaves, covers the capitals shaped like ancient craters (elsewhere resembling baskets of various forms), the parapets of the galleries, and the cornices that
They mark the birth of arches. The flat and chiaroscuro manner of carving remains fixed throughout the millennium of the history of Byzantine art: it not only continues to adorn the churches of the second and third golden periods, but also extends to reliefs of anthropomorphic and more generally iconographic subjects, which ornament various objects of worship and luxury. This occurs because in Byzantium, by Roman inheritance, the leading art remains architecture with that particular sense which has been mentioned: that is to say, it is always the structural layout of the object—whether building or chapel—that prevails and predetermines the plan which the sculpture is to adorn. Sculpture does not here attain isolated and autonomous forms, as happens in the “spatial” arts of Greece or Italian Renaissance. Whether it be a capital or a transenna—i.e., architectonic members decorated sculpturally—or an episcopal throne or an ivory casket—i.e., autonomous objects not bound to the structure of a particular building—the relief displayed upon them behaves in the same way: it is always confined within the limits of an extremely tenuous model, purely chromatic in character, such as not to break the unity of the surface it embellishes and decorates, whether this be the wall of a church adorned with marble panels bearing figures of Madonnas or saints, or the front of a sarcophagus, the side of a chapel, the valve of a diptych, the face of a coin or a seal. And one understands, especially if one considers the great importance assumed in so refined a civilization by structural elements, that the highest expressions of Byzantine sculpture are realized in ivory objects. In the Justinianic age this class of precious small sculptures is represented by the large five-compartment diptychs of religious or profane subject, which continue the tradition of consular and imperial diptychs (e.g., perhaps the “Barberini Ivory” in the Louvre, representing an emperor, perhaps Anastasius, on horseback); by caskets (e.g., among many, the Berlin casket with the representation of Christ among the Apostles), by boxes for eulogiae, by panels for caskets, furniture, and vessels. The masterpiece of ivory sculpture of the 6th century is the great throne of Maximian at Ravenna (Museum of the Archbishopric), which many scholars believe to be of Alexandrian origin, especially on account of the iconographic character of the panels with the Stories of the Hebrew Joseph; but which is more probably executed, if not in Constantinople itself, at Antioch: both because of the form of the throne, which presupposes its visibility from every side—and thus suggests a use more compatible with the particular arrangements and liturgy of the Syracusan church—and also because of the style of the carvings, which approaches that of five-panel ivory plaques of precisely Antiochene origin (Murano panels in the Ravenna Museum, the British Museum, the Vatican, Egina, and the “Cabinet des Médailles”).
In the “second golden period” the production of caskets and ivory reliefs must have been very intense at Constantinople, judging from the very large number of specimens which have survived and are today scattered through the museums of Europe and America, in church treasuries, and in private collections. Among the most famous caskets are those of Veroli in the South Kensington Museum and that of the Bargello in Florence (10th century); among the reliefs—often true ivory icons or triptychs for domestic worship—the most refined are those produced by court artists working for the emperors themselves and their circle in the 10th century: important, also because it serves as a chronological reference, is the relief in the “Cabinet des Médailles” representing Christ crowning Romanos II and Eudoxia (Bertha of Provence: the ivory is therefore slightly later than 994); particularly fine—perhaps the masterpiece of the series—is the panel with the Virgin and Child in the Archiepiscopal Museum at Utrecht (10th century).
It is to be noted that a number of large marble panels of this time approach the ivories both in the subject of their sculptures and in the character of their modelling; so that, if in the 6th century the sculpture of the small objects of Byzantine art still drew inspiration from monumental sculpture, from the 10th century onwards the opposite seems to occur; in any case, even in the large panels we recognize the same broadly spaced and simplified compositions, the same elongated, elegant figures, barely detached from the unified background by means of a light relief bounded by contours of extreme fineness, varied internally by sharp lines which create in front of the modelling the most delicate shadows. Many of these panels are found reused outside Byzantium (e.g., in St Mark’s, Venice); the finest surviving example, though mutilated, is that with the Virgin Orans, from the monastery of the Mangana, now in the Museum of Constantinople (mid-10th century).
The same style of the ivories is recognized in the less frequent reliefs on steatite (a particularly fine example: the Archangel Gabriel, assignable to the 14th century, in the Bandini Museum at Fiesole) and on other minerals of the most delicate colors; and on objects of silverwork and goldwork. These are rather rare in the first period: for the most part associated with enamels, they constitute those “cloisonné” or alveolate enamels, whose technique derives, perhaps through the mediation of nomads, from the East, and particularly from Persia. Famous is the
Cross reliquary from the Treasure of the Sancta Sanctorum of the Lateran: its surface is adorned with seven episodes from the childhood of Jesus, executed in enamels (zones of translucent and colored glass paste, bound with gold threads). This precious object can be dated to the early 6th century and is therefore one of the oldest monuments of Byzantine enameling. However, it is in the second period, from the 10th century onward, that the taste for luxury and the chromatic preciosity of Byzantine society under the Macedonian and Comnenian dynasties finds expression in countless goldsmith works, among which true masterpieces of this technique: particularly among the large reliquaries containing fragments of the True Cross (staurothecae), such as the statuotheca of Limburg, etc.; the bindings of Evangeliaries and other liturgical books (examples in the Treasury of St. Mark in Venice); the decoration of "templa" and altar dossals (e.g., the enamels reused in the "Pala d'Oro" of St. Mark); liturgical furnishings (patens, chalices, etc.); imperial crowns and other extremely precious objects for adorning the ceremonial garments of the basileus and court dignitaries (e.g., the crown of Constantine Monomachus [1042–54] in the Budapest Museum), etc. In these objects, the skill of Byzantine goldsmiths often combines different techniques: relief obtained by repoussé, engraving with burin, niello, alveolate enamels, etc., sometimes achieving true technical marvels: e.g., certain figures executed with a single casting of raised and connected enamel (e.g., in the Treasury of St. Mark in Venice). This ambiguity and blending of techniques, these works where sculpture, goldsmithing, *musaico*, and painting merge, blurring their boundaries and exchanging their usual prerogatives, are further proof that Byzantine civilization had entirely abandoned the plastic and spatial sense of classical antiquity—not only in painting but in all other techniques: *musaico*, frescoes, icons, miniatures. Indeed, especially for Byzantine painting, what was said of sculpture applies: it cannot be understood unless one keeps in mind that, first and foremost, it is conceived as architectural decoration, and of an architecture, like that of Late Antiquity, "dematerialized." In an early Christian church, pictorial expression begins to assert itself even with the very walls and structural members of the building. Enter Hagia Sophia and look around: one sees only colonnades and tracery; thus, one perceives not a plastic but a chiaroscuro, pictorial image. This initial broad color scheme is heightened and given elementary articulation by the revetments of polychrome marbles, the marble columns themselves, the capitals reduced to lace-like forms, and the cornices. The *musaico* cladding, which covers the upper part of the building in its splendid mantle, finally adds to this space an even livelier, more varied, and more coherent chromatic value.
Nothing remains in Constantinople of the *musaico* works commissioned by emperors from Constantine to Justinian; very little also survives from the "first golden age." In Hagia Sophia, a restoration of the decoration was ordered immediately after the disaster of 558 by Justin II; and according to passages in Theophanes and Corippus, it seems to have included a cycle of scenes from the New Testament. The current cleaning has revealed, especially in the narthex, *musaico* of an ornamental character (large crosses, rosettes, garlands) executed with the utmost care, likely dating to the 6th century.
What remains outside Constantinople (St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, Cyprus, etc.) exhibits provincial artistic traits; however, with the exception of the remarkable Justinianic additions to the *musaico* of Ravenna (imperial panels in San Vitale; processions of Virgins and Martyrs in Sant'Apollinare Nuovo) and the panels, about a century later, from Thessalonica (especially in Hagios Demetrios), which with their exceptional quality attest to the work of court artists. During the Iconoclastic period, the production of *musaico* did not cease, though it was limited to non-anthropomorphic subjects. An idea of what the decorations of this time in Constantinople (especially in the Palace) might have looked like is preserved by the splendid *musaico* works of Islamic commission but executed by Byzantine artists in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (691–92) and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus (c. 715).
Painting, of course, was not limited to *musaico*: fresco decoration must have been widespread, though today only provincial remnants survive from the early period, especially in Rome (Santa Maria Antiqua); the late frescoes of Syria and the equally numerous and fascinating ones of Coptic art in Egypt cannot properly be considered early Christian; in Constantinople, a trace remains in the crypt of the Odalar Mosque (7th century). For illuminated religious manuscripts, it is very difficult to determine their provenance due to the great stylistic blending of the time; it is easier to recognize those following a pictorial tradition of rather Roman character (defined by some as "Alexandrian"), such as the Vienna Genesis or the Joshua Roll in the Vatican, from those still tied to the persistent "Neo-Attic" Syrian style (Rossano and Sinope Gospels). Almost all portable icons from the early period were destroyed during the Iconoclastic controversy; a few rare examples, from the monasteries of Sinai, are preserved in the Kiev Museum.
In the "second golden age," as in architecture so in the pictorial decoration of early Christian art, the concept takes precise form that the church should symbolize the divine work of creation and redemption. In the New Church, the "Nea" of Basil I (867–86), for the first time the decorative system was present in its complete integrity, which was then to become canonical for centuries in all Greek-Aschismatic churches. In the dome (the heavenly church), one saw the Christ Pantocrator and Demiurge, surrounded by angelic hierarchies; in the spandrels, the Four Evangelists; in the apse (the transition from the heavenly to the earthly church),
The Virgin in an attitude of prayer and intercession; in the naves (earthly church) the "Great Feasts": representations of the Gospel narrative from the Annunciation to Pentecost – with a topographical prominence, even within the body of the church, of the two most important: the Crucifixion and the Resurrection –; in the remaining spaces, figures of patriarchs, prophets, martyrs, and saints.
This dogmatic and liturgical arrangement, whose schematism is reflected even within the individual iconographic panels, has no example today in the capital; but it can be seen reflected in the mosaic decorations of two Greek churches: that of Hossios Lukas in Phocis (998–1050) and that of Daphni in Attica (ca. 1080). The properly Constantinopolitan pictorial style is attested by two recently discovered lunettes in the great Hagia Sophia: one from the time of Leo VI (886–912), the other slightly later. To the various currents into which the art of the Byzantine Middle Ages branches out, other major provincial decorations may be assigned: in Hagia Sophia of Kiev (ca. 1037), in the Church of the Dormition of Nicaea (1025–28, now destroyed), in the Nea Moni of Chios (1042–56), etc.; to one or another of these currents, still not well defined, are also linked large sections of execution or direct Byzantine influence in the great Italian mural decorations: especially in Venice (San Marco) and elsewhere along the Adriatic coast, and in Sicily.
In the "third golden period," the art of the mosaic experienced a final splendid flourishing in Byzantium: its masterpiece is the decoration, fortunately almost entirely preserved, of the two narthexes and part of the nave of the Kalrie Giamia (from 1303): a work of refined chromatics without equal; the ultimate, most mature result of a figurative culture entirely devoted to color, already moving toward dissolution, which here truly leaves us its swan song.
In general, frescoes retain a more popular and narrative character; however, apart from those in the parekklesion (a side chapel added to the church) in the same Kalrie Giamia, roughly contemporary with the mosaics, almost only provincial examples have survived, revealing more or less provincial accents: from those in the rock-hewn churches of Cappadocia to those in Russian churches (e.g., Neredizi near Novgorod, 1199) or Macedonian ones (e.g., Nerezi, 1164), or in Serbia, or on the island of Crete. Here, toward the end of the Middle Ages, a most fruitful pictorial school developed, which then spread its works and artists throughout Greece (especially in the numerous churches of Mistra and, after the fall of the Empire, in the monasteries of Athos, the Meteora, and elsewhere in the Balkans: where it joined the "Macedonian school"). The Cretan painters, who are the most direct and faithful heirs of the properly Constantinopolitan tradition, also migrated in large numbers to Venice and the Ionian Islands: gradually absorbing stronger Venetian accents, they formed that school of painting, especially of icons, Cretan-Venetian, which, permeating all of Christian the East with its images, would slowly transform its artistic culture, stubbornly Byzantinizing, into a properly European one. For, especially in the final period and in the post-Byzantine era, it is the painting of icons that saw predominant development: and these panels, the work of painters almost exclusively Cretan or Ionian, operating in Venice or in lands still under Venetian rule, spread as isolated cult objects or grouped in the great iconostases of churches throughout the Greco-Sicilian world; alongside the precious and much rarer portable mosaics (e.g., panels in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence).
Among the manuscripts adorned with miniatures – which in the "second golden period" reached an artistic quality often exceptionally high – the Gospel books continued to be in vogue, as did, from the Old Testament, the Octateuchs (containing the first eight books of the Bible); but the preference of medieval Byzantines went to the Psalter, which could be illuminated according to two systems: that of marginal miniatures (e.g., the Chludov Psalter in Moscow, 9th century) and that (e.g., the famous ms. gr. 139 in Paris) with full-page plates illustrating the life of David and the canticles following the Psalms. Other books widely diffused in the Byzantine Middle Ages, often splendidly illuminated, are the Menologia, which illustrate the lives of the saints according to the order of the calendar (e.g., the Menologion of Basil II in the Vatican). In the third period, there are still splendidly illuminated frontispieces even in books of secular subject, such as the Chronicle of Skylitzes in Madrid (14th century); and the works of John Kantakouzenos (1341–54), with two magnificent full-page portraits of the author: one depicting him in imperial costume, the other in the black habit of a monk (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, gr. 1242); etc.
The art of Byzantium was not confined to the geographical and chronological limits of the Empire. Throughout the Middle Ages its works were exemplary (this was precisely their civilizing historical function) both for the barbarian and post-barbarian West (whose art, more than the style, yielded to the fundamental iconographic modules) and especially for the barbarian and Slavic East, to which it gave the very foundations of a figurative culture that long survived the fall of Byzantium; and it formed the basis of the "national" arts of those peoples: we may say until no more than two centuries ago, that is, until the moment of their difficult adhesion to the post-Renaissance art of Western Europe. – See Plates XCIX-C.