BYZANTINE, ART. - Of the civilization that developed in the Eastern Roman Empire, with Constantinople as its center, between the 6th and 15th centuries, the artistic expression was without doubt the highest and the most refined. It was the figurative language of a society of the court, which inherited and transmitted unbroken, together with the forms of the late Roman monarchical ceremonial, 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 whole history of art; but the reasons for such critical uneasiness might lie in a misunderstanding, due to the very way the problem is framed, which appears to a large extent illegitimate. In fact, Byzantine artistic culture did not, properly speaking, have origins: its specific character was, from the very beginning, that of a full, refined maturity, and almost senility. It fixed in a centuries-old tradition the most cultured and courtly aspect of late Roman and early Christian art: that is, not of Hellenistic art, as some scholars maintain (Ainalov, Morey, Princeton school), since this had long since been absorbed into the ars una of the Roman Empire; nor, as others would have it (Strzygowski, Duthuit, French school), of Oriental art, which, in the sense that concerns us here, was nothing but a provincial aspect of Greco-Roman art; nor even of Roman art proper, as the archaeology of the last century held: but rather of late Roman art, which, while welcoming — nor could it have happened otherwise — all the strands of the weary Greco-Roman tradition, with its veins of Orientalism, was something profoundly different from these. It was precisely in that cosmopolitan culture of the immense Empire unified by Rome that, especially from the 3rd century onward, the "principles" of early Christian art asserted themselves — very different both from the Greek plastic vision and from the mid-Roman illusionistic vision — and it was these principles that, welcomed by Constantinople, remained the foundation of the Byzantine vision throughout its history, while the barbarian West detached itself from them and matured the art of the Middle Ages (Wickhoff, Riegl, Schlosser, Sas-Zaloziecky, Bettini). Of this there is further proof in the very millennial vicissitude of Byzantine art which, in the passage of the centuries, seemed not so much to give concrete form in varying shapes to a renewing creative capacity, as rather to devote itself to the exploitation and refinement of a formal heritage already entirely assembled at the outset.
I. ARCHITECTURE
From the foundation of Constantinople (330) to the age of Justinian (6th century), Byzantine architecture is not distinguished by truly characteristic features from that of the other great cities of the eastern part of the Empire.
Although very little of it has survived in the capital, we find there the fundamental buildings, by then everywhere diffused in similar forms, of paleochristian worship: for the liturgical synaxis, Greco-Roman basilicas (longitudinal apsed halls divided into naves by colonnades and covered by trussed roofs: such were, for example, St. Sophia, St. Irene, etc.; the only one still standing is that of St. John Studius - today Mirachor giamia - founded in 463); martyria, as a rule with centralized symmetry, for the cult of martyrs, saints, relics and sanctified places; and baptisteries, with circular or polygonal plan. A distinctive feature, in comparison with the analogous paleochristian buildings of the western part of the Empire, is in this period, in Constantinople as in the whole Levant, the repugnance for the use of vaults and especially of domes, as a rule replaced by wooden roofs even in buildings with a centralized plan: this owing to the persistence here, unlike in the West, of residues of Hellenistic taste, which oppose the latest results of Roman vaulted and domed architecture, and prevent it from reaching there the extreme maturity of contemporary western monuments, such as St. Lawrence in Milan and St. Vitale in Ravenna (Zaloziecky, Bettini). It is only with Justinian and with his reconnecting, in a final attempt at unification of the Empire, to the culture of the motherland Rome, that the architecture of Constantinople decisively accepts and makes its own the western Roman constructive syntax and diffuses it in the eastern provinces. After the grave Nika sedition (532), which destroyed the finest buildings of the capital, Justinian, availing himself especially of the work of the two great architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, had the city rebuilt in more genuinely late-Roman forms, especially as regards the coverings, which from then on became, even in religious architecture, almost exclusively vaults and domes: advised to this both by the recent experience of the extreme perishability of trusses in case of fire, and by the particular symbolic intention which, in the 6th century in the East, invests the very form of the Christian temple. The Greco-Roman basilica, which until then had held uncontested dominion, is then replaced, even for the normal eucharistic cult, by the centralized and domed temple, which previously had been used, though deprived of a true dome, almost exclusively for martyria. To this preference, undoubtedly deliberate and later become systematic in Byzantine architecture until its decline, and inherited by the Greek-schismatic architecture that derived from it, contributed both the evolution of the cult of relics in the East and the influence of the martyria of the Holy Land, and above all the diffusion, which occurred precisely in the 6th century, of the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, which led to recognizing in the type of the martyrial sanctuary (essentially: a cube surmounted by a half-sphere) the image of the cosmos (Grabar). It is in fact from this moment that the building of the Byzantine church becomes, both in architectural form and in pictorial decoration, in mosaic or fresco, a figure of God and of His work of salvation in the world. This explains the characteristic "inversion" that we notice in the architecture of the eastern provinces tals compared with those of the West throughout the Middle Ages. While in the West, which had nevertheless created and developed the centrally planned domed buildings, the dominant "type" of church for the liturgical synaxis remained the ancient proto-Christian basilica with a longitudinal plan, the Christian East, as a result of the aforementioned precise symbolic intention, welcomed, made its own and handed down through the centuries the centrally planned and domed architectural module, which nevertheless had not been proper to it in its origins.
The masterpiece of this new Byzantine basilical 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 which it seeks to give form to. From the architectural standpoint it is, together with San Vitale in Ravenna, the highest achievement of the art of late Roman building.
Unlike all other ancient architectures, in particular the Greek and Hellenistic ones, Roman architecture had founded its expression on the interior space of the building: the typical Roman monument is the pantheon, formed by a block of interior space defined by a continuous and unitary cylindrical wall, concluded at the top by a dome. This internal spatial form persists also in late Roman architecture, in which, however, the block of central space is no longer defined by a compact wall, but by a pierced wall, in turn surrounded by lesser spaces (niches, ambulatories) and therefore transformed into an "optical wall," one of chiaroscuro ("Temple of Minerva Medica," Santa Costanza, San Lorenzo in Milan, San Vitale in Ravenna). On such a wall, dissolved into colour, it is obvious that a coherent decoration can only be chromatic: therefore in these late Roman buildings sculpture (capitals, friezes, chancel screens, etc.) becomes a kind of marble lace with nothing plastic left about it; and painting becomes a decoration of absolutely chromatic sense (mosaics).
In Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, this refined architectural and pictorial language is brought to express, with grandeur and unequalled assurance, the sense of Christian and universal Romanitas of Justinianic culture, interpreted by the personal genius of the supreme artist Anthemius. Such a convergence of motivations of culture and of genius has never been repeated, and this explains why nothing was ever again built in the medieval East that could equal the fullness and coherence of expression of this singular monument: which today, freed from the disfigurements that had clouded its meaning when the church was transformed into a mosque, with its splendid mosaics returning to light from beneath the Islamic plaster, unfolds before us as one of the highest expressions of all art. Hagia Sophia dominates the history of Byzantine architecture; but 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 is realized in less grandiose forms, though perhaps more hair-splittingly coherent. In the time of Justinian the plans still preserve a certain paleo-Christian variety: alongside
Hagia Sophia rise the church of the Holy Apostles in the form of a free cross (obtained by the intersection of two naves of approximately equal length, covered by a windowed dome over the central square and by four blind vaults over the arms, a true martyrion that housed the imperial burials; now vanished, but replicated in its time in St. John at Ephesus and echoed later in St. Mark's in Venice); the church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus (an octagon inserted within a quadrangular perimeter: a building still extant, though transformed into a mosque, which reflects, even in the form of its low and depressed dome, a type of Roman mausoleum a century earlier); the church of St. Irene (a basilica with a Latin cross and dome; transformed into a Turkish military museum), etc. But, after the 9th century, that is, after the crisis of iconoclasm, which provoked a caesura in the history of Byzantine civilization, especially of its art - the art that was rebuilt in Byzantium under the Macedonian dynasty now appears detached from its late Roman and early Christian roots, and assumes more "national" forms, less Roman in their grandeur and pervaded by a nostalgic aspiration toward the impossible resurrection of the great Hellenic past. This is not, of course, a true neo-Hellenism: even a hasty reflection on the fact that classical Greek art was the most fully plastic of all others, whereas Byzantine art was, with almost equal absoluteness, a chromatic art, would suffice to strike this term from the vocabulary of any concrete history or criticism. And if in the sculpture and painting of the dynasties of the Macedonians, the Comneni and finally the Palaeologi there resurface, though reduced to shadows of color without body, several of the figures of Greek art, Byzantine architecture remains, even throughout the entire period from the restoration of the images to the fall of Constantinople (842-1453), always bound to Roman constructive syntax. But its spaces undergo a kind of contraction: the spirit folds back upon itself, loses creative vigor. The creation of this period is the typical Byzantine church, with an inscribed cross, derived from one of the many models of cruciform early Christian martyria. Generally of much smaller dimensions than Hagia Sophia and the other great Justinianic temples, this type of church narrows and articulates the still Roman great spatial expansion of those. The dome, over the center of the crossing of the naves, is no longer the vast and airy cupola of Hagia Sophia: diminished, raised on an ever higher and more articulated drum, it has become an almost detached globosity, 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 the barrel vaults that prolong the four great arches that support it, and trace the Greek cross on the exterior. This outward discharge, of late Roman origin, makes it possible to thin to the utmost the piers that previously received at the crossing the fall of the great arches, or to replace them with slender and graceful columns. The result is a form of composite space, in which each bay is clearly defined and coordinated around the central domed block, with the same pseudo-plastic sense with which a mosaic figure, for example one from Daphni, stands out against its golden background. To this arrangement correspond, with secondary variations, in Constantinople the Budrum giamia (Myreleon of Romanus Lecapenus, 920-44), the Kilisse giamia, the Kahrie giamia (St. Saviour in Chora, 10th-11th century), the Pantocrator (1126-36), etc.; the first and most famous example of a church of this type had been the Nea of Basil I, today vanished. The Constantinopolitan model is followed especially in Thessalonica, which at this time is the "second capital of the Empire": it can be recognized, albeit through local variations of a decorative character, in the Madonna of the Coppersmiths (1028), in St. Panteleimon (12th century), in the Holy Apostles (13th century), etc. The period of the Palaeologan restoration, which follows the Latin conquest (1261) and lasts until the fall of the capital into the hands of the Turks (1453), brings nothing substantially new to the art of Constantinople, except an accentuation of those decorative preciousnesses and of that exoticizing restlessness that had already announced themselves in the age of the Comneni. In architecture the module of the "inscribed cross" still dominates, whose space increasingly distances itself from the vast Roman expansion of the origins. The domes narrow their diameter and rise: reduced almost to lanterns, they withdraw from the image of the church's interior space to assume a exquisitely, at times capriciously ornamental value: for example the Fatyie giamia (Virgin Pammacaristos), etc. It is customary to oppose to the Constantinopolitan school, in the Byzantine architecture of the Middle Ages, a "Greek school" (Millet), where the "inscribed cross" has a more shortened module (churches of Attica) and where longitudinal basilicas with vaults are also present, which have some resemblance to the Romanesque basilicas of the West (Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus, Crete, Cyprus). Especially in the last period, and in the post-Byzantine era, provincial subgroups can be recognized, in which to the Constantinopolitan derivation are added diverse influences, determining varieties interesting from the decorative point of view, but constructively and architecturally not very organic (Serbia, Romania, Russia, etc.). A group of particular interest is constituted by the churches of the monasteries of Mount Athos (Lavra, founded in 963; Vatopedi, 11th century; Chilandar, 1197, etc.) and of the Meteora in Thessaly: always with an "inscribed cross," but with the addition of two apses at the ends of the side arms, so as to trace a trefoil plan.
Very little remains of the monuments of civil architecture.
From the Justinianic period, called the "first golden age" of Byzantine art, the grandiose civil buildings, restored or erected by Justinian: the Sacred Palace, the Baths of Zeuxippus, the Augustaeum Forum with the bronze statue of the emperor, etc., have disappeared: of the Great Palace, excavations are now bringing to light part of the mosaic paving. These were thoroughly Roman structures. There remain, as evidence of the skill of those builders, the immense cisterns known as Jerebatan Serai (Sunken Palace) and Binbir Derek (The Thousand and One Columns), with their innumerable vaults supported by forests of columns; and the remains of the palace known as that of Hormisdas on the Sea of Marmara. Also from the "second golden age" (reigns of the Macedonian emperors and Comneni) and of the third (reign of the Palaeologi) very little remains: the largest and very picturesque ruin, for its polychrome facade of alternating marble and brick arranged in geometric figures, is the palace known as Tekfur Serai (probably a pavilion of the imperial palace of Blachernae), in Constantinople. Here, as in Thessalonica and in other major centers of the Empire, there also remain long stretches of the city walls and of the aqueducts. From the last period, outside the capital, the dead city of Mistra in the Peloponnese is of particular interest: besides the numerous churches adorned with magnificent frescoes (Perivleptos, Metropoli, Pandanassa, Vrontochion), one can see there, at the top of the picturesque hill, the grandiose remains of the immense palace of the Despots.
II. SCULPTURE AND MINOR ARTS
The process of progressive decline in sculpture, especially in statuary — understood by classical Greece as fully plastic expression — which had begun in late Roman and early Christian art, is carried forward by Byzantine art: so that there is no cause for wonder, as some do (Duthuit), that statuary almost completely disappears in it, and sculpture is reduced to the decoration of architecture, or to the light modeling of precious reliefs in marble, ivory, and metal. This is a perfectly coherent process; to understand its meaning, however, it does not help to resort to the myth of the influences of a romantic East; rather, it is necessary to keep in mind the form particular character that architectural spaces assume, already in the late Roman and early Christian period: which, as has been said, are no longer bounded by compact walls of pronounced materiality, but by thin diaphragms which, in being transformed into continuous crowns of exedrae, are reduced to an alternation of solids and voids, that is, of lights and darks: to a definition, therefore, no longer of plastic but of chromatic value. Sculptural decoration too, therefore, in order to be coherent with this dematerialized spatial form, must abandon all plastic relief and translate itself into a flat chiaroscuro laying-on, which often achieves results of extreme preciousness.
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, the panels that revet the lower zone of the church, but also by the shimmering chiaroscuro of the capitals, the cornices, the transennae, the chancel screens: carved in relief with crosses, monograms, or vegetal ornaments, but more often pierced through. A splendid marble lace, with continuous scrolls of palms or minute acanthus leaves, covers the capitals shaped like ancient craters (elsewhere resembling baskets of various forms), the parapets of the galleries, the cornices that mark the springing of the arches. This manner of carving, flat and chiaroscuro, remains fixed throughout the millennium of Byzantine art's history: it not only continues to decorate the churches of the second and third golden ages, but also extends to reliefs of anthropomorphic and more generally iconographic subject, which adorn the various objects of worship and luxury. This happens because in Byzantium, by Roman inheritance, the leading art remains architecture with that particular sense of it that has been described: that is, it is always the structural layout of the object — building or chapel — that prevails, and that preordains the plane which sculpture is to decorate. Sculpture does not attain isolated and autonomous forms in it, as happens in the "spatial" arts of Greece or of the Italian Renaissance. Whether it is a capital or a transenna — that is, architectural members decorated sculpturally — or an episcopal throne or an ivory casket — that is, autonomous objects, not bound to the structure of a particular building — the relief that unfolds upon them behaves in the same manner: it is always held within the limits of an extremely tenuous modeling, entirely chromatic, such as not to break the unity of the surface it enriches 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 pyx, the leaf of a diptych, the face of a coin or a seal. And one understands, especially if one thinks of the great importance that the sumptuary arts assume in so refined a civilization, that the highest expressions of Byzantine sculpture are realized in objects of ivory. In the age of Justinian this class of precious small sculptures is represented by the great five-part diptychs of religious or secular subject, which continue the tradition of consular and imperial diptychs (e.g., perhaps the greatest, the "Barberini
Ivory" in the Louvre, representing an emperor, perhaps Anastasius, on horseback); by the pyxes (e.g., among many, the Berlin pyx with the depiction of Christ among the Apostles), by boxes for eulogiae, by panels for caskets, furniture, and furnishings. The masterpiece of ivory sculpture of the 6th century is the great throne of Maximian at Ravenna (Museum of the Archbishop's Palace), which many scholars consider to be of Alexandrian origin, especially because of the iconographic character of the panels with the Stories of Joseph the Hebrew; but which more probably was executed, if not in Constantinople itself, at Antioch: both because of the form of the throne, which presupposes its visibility from every side — and therefore suggests a use more compatible with the particular arrangements and the liturgy of the Syrian church — and also because of the style of the carvings, which approaches that of the five-paneled ivory leaves of precisely Antiochene origin (panels of Murano in the museum of Ravenna, of the British Museum, of the Vatican, of Etchmiadzin, of the "Cabinet des Médailles"). In the "second golden period" the production of caskets and ivory reliefs must have been quite intense in Constantinople, to judge from the very high number of examples that have survived and are today scattered through the museums of Europe and America, in the Treasuries of churches and in private collections. Among the most famous caskets are the Veroli casket of 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 Eudokia (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, which is in the Archiepiscopal Museum of Utrecht (10th century). It should be noted that several marble panels, of large dimensions, of this time, approach the ivories both in the subject of their carving and in the character of their modelling; so that, if in the 6th century the carving of the minute objects of Byzantine art still drew inspiration from monumental sculpture, from the 10th century onward the reverse seems to occur; in any case, even in the large panels we recognize the same broadly spatial 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 within by crisp lines that create the faintest shadows on the surface of the modelling. Many of these panels are found reused outside Byzantium (for example in St. Mark's in Venice); the finest example, though mutilated, is the one with the Virgin Orans, coming from the monastery of the Mangana, today in the Museum of Constantinople (mid-10th century). The same style as 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 of Fiesole) and on other minerals of the most delicate colours; and on objects of silverware and goldsmith's work. These are rather rare in the first period: most often associated with enamels, they constitute those "cloisonné" or cellular enamels, whose technique derives, perhaps through the intermediary of the nomads, from the East, and particularly from Persia. Famous is the reliquary cross of the Treasury of the Sancta Sanctorum of the Lateran: its surface is decorated with seven episodes of the infancy of Jesus, executed in enamels (areas of translucent and coloured glass paste, bound with gold wires). The precious object can be assigned to the early 6th century, and is therefore one of the oldest monuments of Byzantine enamelling. But it is in the second period, from the 10th century onward, that the taste for luxury and for chromatic preciousness of Byzantine society under the Macedonian and Komnenian dynasties finds its answer in countless objects of goldsmith's work, among which are authentic masterpieces of this technique: especially among the great reliquaries containing fragments of the True Cross (staurothekes): e.g. the staurotheke of Limburg, etc.; the bindings of Evangeliaries and other liturgical books (examples in the Treasury of St. Mark's in Venice); the decorations of the "templa" and of altar dossals (e.g., the enamels reused in the "pala d'oro" of St. Mark's); liturgical furnishings (patens, chalices, etc.); imperial crowns and the other most precious objects of ornament of the ceremonial vestments of the basileus and of the court dignitaries (for example the crown of Constantine Monomachos [1042-54] in the museum of Budapest), etc. In these objects, the skill of Byzantine goldsmiths often combines different techniques: relief obtained by embossing the metal, with burin engraving, with niello, with cellular enamels, etc., sometimes achieving true prodigies of technique: for example in certain figures obtained with a single casting of raised and convex enamel (e.g. in the Treasury of St. Mark's in Venice). This ambiguity and mingling of techniques, these works where sculpture, goldsmith's work, mosaic and painting unite, confusing their limits and exchanging their normal prerogatives, are one more proof of the fact that Byzantine civilization has entirely abandoned the plastic and spatial sense of classicism: not in painting alone, but in all the other techniques: mosaics, frescoes, icons, miniatures. Also, and above all for Byzantine painting, what was said of sculpture holds true: that it cannot be understood unless one keeps in mind that in the first place it is felt as a decoration of architecture, and of an architecture, such as that of late antiquity, "dematerialized". In a church of Byzantine art the expression of a pictorial character begins to assert itself already with the walls themselves, with the very members of the construction. Let one enter Hagia Sophia and look around: one will see nothing but colonnades and tracery; one will therefore have an image that is not plastic, but chiaroscural, pictorial. This first, broad partition of colour receives an accentuation and an elementary articulation through the revetments of polychrome marbles, the marble columns themselves, the capitals and the friezes reduced to lace. The laying of the mosaics, which clothes the whole upper part of the building with its splendid mantle, is added finally to give this space an even more vivid, more varied, more coherent chromatic value.
Nothing has remained in Constantinople of the mosaics commissioned by the emperors between Constantine and Justinian; very little also of the "first golden period". In Hagia Sophia a redoing of the decoration was ordered immediately after the disaster of 558 by Justin II: and it appears, from passages of Theophanes and of Corippus, that it comprised a cycle of scenes drawn from the New Testament. The cleaning, which is currently being carried out, has brought to light, especially in the narthex, mosaics of an ornamental character (large crosses, rosettes, garlands) of most careful execution, dating in all probability to the 6th century.
What remains outside Constantinople (St. Catherine's of Sinai, Cyprus, etc.) has the characteristics of provincial art; with the exception, however, of the admirable Justinianic additions to the mosaics of Ravenna (imperial panels in St. Vitale; processions of Virgins and Martyrs in St. Apollinare Nuovo) and the panels, of about a century later, of Thessalonica (especially in St. Demetrius), which with their very high quality attest to the work of court artists. In the iconoclastic period the production of mosaics does not cease, although it is limited to non-anthropomorphic subjects: an idea of what the decorations of this time in Constantinople must have been like (especially in the Palace) is preserved for us by the splendid mosaics, of Islamic commission but the work of Byzantine artists, of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem (691-92) and of the Mosque of the Umayyads in Damascus (c. 715).
Painting, of course, was not limited to mosaics: fresco decoration must have been quite widespread, although today of this technique there remain, from the first period, only provincial reflections, especially in Rome (S. Maria Antiqua); the late frescoes of Syria and those, likewise numerous and very interesting, of Coptic art in Egypt cannot properly be considered Byzantine art; in Constantinople some trace remains in the crypt of the Odalar giamia (7th century). Of the religious manuscripts adorned with miniatures it is very difficult to ascertain the provenance, given the great stylistic commingling of the time; it is easier to recognize those that follow a pictorial tradition of a rather Roman character (by others defined as "Alexandrian"), such as the "Genesis" of Vienna, or the "Joshua Roll" in the Vatican, from those still tied to the persistent Syrian "neo-Atticism" (Gospel Books of Rossano, of Sinope). Almost all the portable icons of the first period were destroyed during the struggle over iconoclasm; a few very rare examples, taken from the monasteries of Sinai, are preserved in the museum of Kiev.
In the "second golden period," as in architecture so in the pictorial decoration of Byzantine art, the concept takes precise form that in the church the divine work of creation and redemption must be symbolized. In the New Church, the "Nea" of Basil I (867-86), there was for the first time present in its connected integrity the decorative arrangement, which was later to become canonical over the centuries in all Greek-schismatic churches. In the dome (the heavenly church) could be seen Christ Pantocrator and Demiurge, surrounded by the angelic hierarchies; in the pendentives, the four Evangelists; in the apse (the passage from the heavenly church to the earthly church), the Virgin in the act of prayer and intercession; in the
naves (the earthly church) the "Great Feasts": representations
of the Gospel narrative from the Annunciation to Pentecost
- with a predominance, also topographical, in the body of the church
of the two most important: Crucifixion and Resurrection -;
in the remainder, figures of patriarchs, prophets, martyrs and saints.
This dogmatic and liturgical ordering, whose schematism is reflected also in the interior of the individual iconographic
panels, has, today, no example in the capital; but
it can be seen reflected in the mosaic decorations of two
Greek churches: that of Hosios Loukas in Phocis (c. 998-
1050) and that of Daphni in Attica (c. 1680). The pictorial
style properly Constantinopolitan is attested by
two lunettes recently discovered in the great Hagia Sophia:
one from the time of Leo VI (886-912), the other from slightly later.
To the various currents into which the art of the
mosaicist of the Byzantine Middle Ages branches, other
great provincial decorations can be assigned: at Hagia Sophia in Kiev (c. 1037),
at the church of the Dormition of Nicaea (1025-28), today destroyed; at the Nea Moni of Chios (1042-56), etc.; to one or
the other of these currents, still not well defined, are
linked also large stretches of execution or of direct Byzantine influence, in the great mosaic decorations in Italy:
at Venice above all (St. Mark's) and elsewhere on the Adriatic
coast, and in Sicily. In the "third golden period" the art of the
mosaic has a last splendid reflowering in Byzantium:
a masterpiece of it is the decoration, fortunately preserved
almost integrally, of the two narthexes and of part of the naos
of the Kahrie giamia (from 1303): a work of a chromatic refinement without equal; the extreme, most mature result of a figurative civilization wholly turned to colour, already set on its
decline, which has here truly left us its swan song.
A more popular and narrative character is generally retained
by the frescoes, of which however, if we except those of the
parecclesion (a space added to the church) in the same *Kahrie
giamia*, taken a little later than the mosaics, almost
only examples in the provinces have been saved, and they therefore reveal,
more or less, provincial accents: from those of the
rock churches of Cappadocia, to those of Russian churches (e.g.
Nereditsa near Novgorod, 1199) or Macedonian (e.g. Nerez,
1164), or of Serbia, or of the island of Crete. Here, toward the end of the
Middle Ages, a most fertile school of painting develops,
which then spreads works and artists into Greece (above all in the
numerous churches of Mistra and, after the fall of the Empire,
in the monasteries of Athos, of Meteora, and elsewhere in the Balkans:
where it stands alongside the "Macedonian school"). The Cretan
painters, who are the most direct and faithful heirs of the tradition
properly Constantinopolitan, also pass in great numbers to Venice and to the Ionian Islands: absorbing gradually
ever greater accents from Venetian art, they constitute
that school of painting, above all of icons, Cretan-
Venetian, which, permeating with its own images
the whole Christian East, will slowly transform its
artistic culture, tenaciously Byzantinizing, into a properly
European culture. For, especially in the last period,
and in the post-Byzantine era, it is the painting of icons that has a
prevalent development: and these panels, the work of painters
almost exclusively Cretan or Ionian, working at Venice
or in the lands that remained under Venetian dominion, spread,
as isolated objects of worship, or grouped in the great
iconostases of the churches, throughout the whole world of
Greek-schismatic religion; alongside the precious, and far rarer,
portable mosaics (e.g., panels of the museum of the Opera del
Duomo in Florence).
Among the manuscripts adorned with miniatures - which in the
"second golden period" reach an artistic quality
often exceptionally high - the Evangelaries continue
to be in vogue, and, of the Old Testament, the Octateuchs (containing the first eight
books of the Bible); but the predilection of the Byzantines
of the Middle Ages goes to the Psalter, which can be illuminated
following two systems: that of marginal miniatures
(e.g. the Chludov Psalter in Moscow, 9th century), and that
(e.g. famous is ms. gr. 139 of Paris) with full-page
plates, illustrating the life of David and the canticles that
follow the Psalms. Other books of great diffusion in the Byzantine Middle Ages, often splendidly illuminated,
are the Menologia, which illustrate the lives of the saints
following the order of the calendar (e.g. the Menologion of
Basil II in the Vatican Library). In the third period there are
still "frontispieces" splendidly illuminated also in
books of profane subject, such as the Chronicle of Scylitzes in Madrid (14th century); and the works of John
Cantacuzenus (1341-54), with two very beautiful full-page portraits of the author: depicted, in one in the
imperial costume, in the other under the black habit of the
monks (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, gr. 1242); etc.
Byzantine art was not restricted to the geographical
and chronological limits of the Empire. Throughout the whole Middle Ages
its works were exemplary (their civilizing historical function
was precisely this) both for the barbaric and post-barbaric
West (to whose art it yielded, more than style, the fundamental iconographic
models), and above all for the barbaric and
Slavic East, to which it gave indeed the foundations of a figurative
culture, which survived there long after the fall of Byzantium; and it constituted the foundation of the "national"
arts of those peoples: we can say up to no more than two
centuries ago, that is, up to the moment of their laborious adherence
to the post-Renaissance art of Western Europe. -
See Plates XCIX-C.
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1930; A. Goldschmidt e Wietsmann, *Byz. Elfenbeinshaupt des X.-
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Sergio Bettini