In the Early Christian Byzantine Art Icons Were Used for Devotional Purposes

Mosaics in San Vitale, Ravenna.

Art During the Decline of Rome

The interruption-up of the Western Roman Empire was accompanied by wars, invasions, and immense dislocations of the social stability of Europe. Under such atmospheric condition it was inevitable that the sense of security without which craftsmanship and skill cannot flourish, should exist undermined, and with information technology the traditions on which the cultural languages of mankind are built. At such times non only the arts of painting and sculpture and architecture become chaotic but also linguistic communication and literature. Men must have worked, eaten, congenital houses, written books, sung songs, carved statues, and painted images during those few centuries we call the Dark Ages (c.400-800), just it is difficult to picture them at it. In that location seems to be no heart of focus, no peg on which to hang our thoughts nearly those queer, flavourless centuries. Rome was expressionless as a cultural centre of gravity, and early Christian art was surviving just on the fringes of Europe - in Constantinople and Ireland.

The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste
10th century ivory relief panel.
Bode Museum, Berlin. Ivory was the
most common early Christian sculpture
in Constantinople.

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Rise of Christian Art

The earliest examples of Christian art in the Roman catacombs are crude and timid, but for that very reason they, are not hampered past the weight of a strong stylistic tradition. Before Christianity could evolve an articulate artistic language of its own it was necessary that the pagan linguistic communication of art, then advisedly perfected past the Greeks, should disintegrate. And it was fortunate that at the very moment when the earliest Christian artists were groping for a means of expression, that disintegration was already in an advanced stage. The symbolic language (iconography) for which the Christian was searching would have been strangled by the descriptive linguistic communication of pre-Christian fine art. (Meet also: Christian Roman Fine art [313 onwards].)

Every bit long as Christianity had no official status it could produce no art of any permanence. In the Roman catacombs a few tentative experiments in evolving the new symbolism were fabricated, simply they are of niggling aesthetic interest. There was, however, 1 exception to the defoliation that reigned over most of Europe. There was a patch that was comparatively peaceful and comparatively civilized round the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Syrian arab republic, Asia Pocket-sized, and Egypt formed an surface area inside which, given favourable circumstances, new types of fine art could develop. It needed the stimulus of a state-protected religion, and the consequent appearance of a set of state-approved churches to give such art a dwelling house-place. Information technology was at this moment that the pendulum that had swung steadily from Egypt to Crete, from Crete to Athens, and from Athens to Rome, stopped swinging and hung in the balance, waiting for the appearance of a fresh impulse to reverse its motility.

Church building Fine art in Constantine's Eastern Empire

If the impulse tin can be attributed to a single man, that homo is the Emperor Constantine, who had the good sense to choose this moment (330 CE) to move eastwards into the surface area that still showed signs of civilization, and to transfer the seat of the Empire to Constantinople (Byzantium), and at the same fourth dimension to adopt a protective and tolerant attitude towards Christianity. At terminal it was possible for Christian religious art to adhere itself to something permanent - to the church wall. In that location information technology could find a home for itself more than plumbing equipment than the art of Egypt had e'er plant in the tomb, or the art of Greece in the temple. The art of Egypt belonged to the tomb simply in the sense that a bundle of share certificates belongs to a fire-proof safe; and Greek statues had belonged to the temple only in the sense that easel-pictures vest to a room. But early on Christian fine art belongs to the church every bit the text of a book belongs to the paper on which it is printed. The Christian artist had an opportunity given to no other artist before him, the opportunity of creating a consummate iconography of the visual side of religion, and not only of illustrating it. It was an opportunity almost as well big for any man to grasp, and at first it was washed fumblingly. Run into, for instance, the Byzantine-influenced Garima Gospels (390-660) from Ethiopia's Abba Garima Monastery, the earth's most ancient illuminated Christian manuscripts.

If it had been left to Rome to do it, it would have been badly done. All Rome could practise was to apply worn-out pagan symbols to the new faith, to depict an Apollo or an Orpheus and characterization him Jesus, or to brand Christ and his disciples wait (every bit they do in the early mosaic of Due south. Pudenziana in Rome), rather like an informal meeting of the Roman Senate. (Run across besides: Roman Fine art.) Fortunately the Oriental section of the Empire was much better fitted for the task. Fifty-fifty, earlier Christianity had been recognized, a mysticized version of paganism (known every bit Mithraism) had been developing in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, and information technology was easy enough to adjust this mystical frame of listen to Christianity.

Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna

It is difficult to set a precise date at which the pendulum can exist said to accept begun to swing back. 1 of the earliest major works of Christian art is the mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna of the 4th century. Hither, in a tiny brick edifice no bigger than a country cottage, the Roman idioms are used with a purely Oriental result. The Saints look similar Roman philosophers, the beardless Christ is zip but a rustic shepherd sitting in rather vapid bucolic contentment amid his sheep, and yet to enter the brick shell and to discover oneself in an unearthly gloom encrusted with blue and silver and gold mosaics is to exist taken at a leap correct across the Greek peninsula into an atmosphere that only a semi-oriental vision could have conceived. This is the earliest successful attempt to serve up the old pagan wine in the new Christian canteen.

Church of St Sophia (Constantinople); Church of San Vitale (Ravenna)

The pendulum has begun to swing, but only merely. A more spectacular impulse was given to it by the building of the great church of St Sophia in Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian and his pious wife Theodora. We are not here concerned with the church building every bit a landmark in architectural construction, and the mosaics which cover its interior accept only relatively recently been freed from the coat of whitewash with which Islam insisted on roofing them after the Turkish occupation of Constantinople. Merely Justinian erected an equally significant though smaller example of sixth-century Byzantine art in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. Hither the new symbolism is beginning to proceeds the upper hand. The Roman idioms are still there but they have ceased to count for much. They are supplanted by a new orchestral employ of colour. Color, treated by the Egyptians and Greeks merely as a useful descriptive or decorative addition, is hither used for pedigree emotional ends.

What is pregnant about this building and its successors is that information technology was regarded, architecturally, as a set of interior wall-spaces. It was built from the inside outwards. It had no significance whatever until one entered it. If the typical Greek temple was an object of deliberate self-independent dazzler, to exist looked at from the outside - a building of cocky-conscious perfection which a little added sculpture would certainly better, but which could easily survive the absence of information technology - then the church of San Vitale is a blank brick book whose pages are meaningless until they have been lined with mosaic.

Use of Mosaics as a Grade of Christian Architectural Art

The Christian creative person was being given his opportunity with a vengeance. The new attitude to mosaic is of the utmost significance. Mosaic art was not an unknown medium earlier the Byzantine era, but information technology had been thought of past the Greeks and Romans as a ways of decorating a surface unsuitable for pigment - a floor where paint would have been worn away, or the inside of a fountain, where paint would accept been washed off. But now it became not only a structural part of the wall, but the raison d'etre for the wall. Conceived, in a sense, equally a new class of Biblical art, the wall was built for the sole purpose of holding the mosaic, and windows were pierced in the wall for the sole purpose of illuminating it. Encounter in particular: Ravenna Mosaics (c.400-600).

Mosaic, unlike paint, is a rigid, inflexible medium; it imposes a fierce subject area on the artist who uses it. The Romans, who used it in places where paint was unsuitable, tried to make information technology express painterly ideas, and the early Christian artists of the Westward (run into the upper panels of Sant' Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna and in St Maria Maggiore in Rome) continued so to use information technology. Even in San Vitale, where the general upshot is remote and unearthly, the 2 famous groups of Justinian and his ecclesiastical attendants and soldiers on one side and of Theodora with her handmaidens on the other, are relics of a Roman view of life in which the Emperor's image could find an appropriate dwelling house on the walls of the church, and the globe was as worthy of the artist's attention as the heavens. Just as the Byzantine pendulum continued to swing, and every bit the influence of the Eastern group of artists spread, mosaic began to be used as information technology should be used, equally the perfect vehicle for visual symbolism on a large calibration.
William Morris once said mosaic was like beer in that it was no expert unless you had a lot of information technology. In the churches of Parenzo on the Adriatic opposite to Ravenna (sixth century), of Sant' Agnese in Rome (7th century), Santa Prassede in Rome (ninth century), at Daphni, virtually Athens (eleventh century), at Cefalu, in the Capella Palatina and in the Cathedral of Monreale in Sicily (12th century), in St Marking's, Venice (mainly thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), to selection out a handful of typical examples from a host of others, what counts for as much as the quality of the design and the richness of the color is the sheer profusion of the mosaic. It is overpowering through its cumulative consequence. Some of information technology is not peculiarly interesting in detail, just almost always it is impressive in its general planning, in the placing of its climaxes and in its genius for being glowing and remote at the same time.

Development of Mosaic Iconography

In the Byzantine instance the necessary schematization was imposed on the creative person from higher up, and so that he became the illustrator of a series of incidents for the benefit of an illiterate people. His iconography evolved in stages, exemplified by the post-obit works: (1) the upper portions of the sides of the apse of San Vitale (sixth century), where a beardless Moses standing on an impossibly symbolic mountain watches the hand of God emerge from impossibly romantic clouds; (ii) the wall above the apse of Santa Prassede, Rome (9th century), where the twenty-iv elders stand up in a pattern as formal, and as violently distorted, from the point of view of visual truth, as anything Picasso has ever dared to try with the human figure; (3) the mosaics in the domes of the Narthex of St Mark's, Venice (13th century), in which the story of Genesis is told in concentric circles, each divided into square compartments like a modern comic strip. The start is a one-half-hearted attempt to draw an actual scene by a man who is not interested in actuality, but cannot think how to manipulate with it; the second is pure symbolism without a thought for actuality; the third is an attempt to utilise symbolism for the purposes of narrative by a man who has been out of touch on with actuality for 7 centuries, but whose employers are beginning to need information technology in one case more than.

Mosaicists

During the whole of this period no proper name emerges, no mosaicist of genius to whom one tin can bespeak every bit having produced the perfect flower of Byzantine fine art. It is an anonymous art. Even more than in Arab republic of egypt is the creative person submerged in his job and even more than in Egypt is he compelled to work inside a set of established formulas. He is serving a crusade, not exploiting his personality. For this very reason it is not easy to write the history of Byzantine art. To do then is like trying to brand a map of a wide landscape with a distinctive graphic symbol of its own but without milestones or landmarks. Its class is marked by none of those discoveries that the typical European creative person always tries to make and which the art historian delights to record. It is as lilliputian capable of being translated into words as a tune; and, worse notwithstanding, it almost refuses to be translated into reproduction. A photograph of an Egyptian statue gives i a fairly accurate sense of the original, a photograph of a fresco by Giotto or a painting by Velazquez supplies more data about the originals, than pages of laboured description. Only a photograph of the interior of the church at Cefalu bears as little relation to the church itself as a Walt Disney cartoon of Donald Duck does to a Donald Duck drawing. Similarly, a photograph of a Byzantine mosaic may illustrate the boldness of Byzantine formalism, but it fails to convey Byzantine impressiveness. Add to this the unfortunate fact that Byzantine mosaics are not portable, and it becomes plain that to write an adequate account of this - by far the most important - aspect of Byzantine art is well-nigh impossible. And nevertheless, the whole corpus of Byzantine mosaic from the sixth to the twelfth century is ane of the most deeply moving of all manifestations of the human spirit.

Effects of Christian Byzantine Mosaics

Replicas of portions of the Ravenna mosaics have been exhibited throughout Europe. They are as faithful in detail equally a replica needs to be, and even detached from their architectural context their effect is remarkable. As samples they go out nothing to be desired, yet a considerable imaginative effort is needed if they are to have the same emotional effect equally their originals. The Oriental colour orchestration and the encrusted surfaces that take hold of and reflect the light like jewels, survive: but the cumulative ability, the bang-up visual crescendos that depend for their result on sudden changes of scale and the relationship of flat wall to curved semi-dome, are inevitably lost.

What they illustrate quite clearly, even to those who have never seen them in situ, is that here is the only case of a fashion in which Eastern and Western elements run across and are fused. Art historians accept been at considerable pains to analyse the various ingredients - Greek, Roman, Syrian, Semitic, even Mesopotamian - which accept been fused together in different proportions in the best of Byzantine art. Simply, as ever, assay of this kind is just valuable historically. What makes Byzantine medieval art unique is that it achieved the full expression of a mystical Christianity in terms of oriental opulence. In theory, the asceticism of the former should take been contradicted and nullified past the sensuousness of the latter. In do the 2 opposing elements reinforce and intensify each other. The perfection of formal physical beauty that had been the Greek achievement has been abandoned in favour of the formless, timeless, Christian conception of a religion in which perfection was, by definition, unattainable. The creative person, tethered for and then long to the fabric earth, finds himself free to exploit an entirely unlike world of form. Yet because that very freedom from the old mimetic duties might create confusion and chaos, the mimetic field of study is replaced by an equally strict iconographical field of study.

Perhaps the nearest analogue today to this strange mingling of the spiritual and the sensuous is to exist found in Christian Catholic ritual, where both mystery and phenomenon are expressed in terms that could hardly exist more formal, so rigid and prescribed is their pattern, and all the same the symbolic ingredients - the vessels of gold, silver, and the embroidered vestments - could hardly be more materially precious or gorgeous.

Students tin study elsewhere the strict iconographical rules laid down for the creation of Byzantine mosaic art and fresco painting, and the purely technical processes involved in the industry and the handling of the medium - how tesserae of glass and marble were fixed into their bed of mastic, and how gold-foliage was fused between an upper and a lower layer of transparent glass. The whole of the later Byzantine era was characterized by a respect for tradition in both iconography and adroitness. The level of adroitness in ivory carving (see, for case, the Throne of Maximianus, bishop of Ravenna, 556), or low relief sculpture, metallic-work and jewellery, too as miniature painting, frescoes and icons, was remarkably high.

Icons

The influence of Byzantine mannerisms was widespread in the East. All over the Balkans, especially in the area that was in one case Serbia, provincial schools of fresco wall painting took root, but the form of medieval painting that specially concerns us here is icon painting which developed so surprisingly belatedly and continued for so long in Russian federation. When Constantinople passed into Mohammedan keeping it was Russia which became heir to the Byzantine view of life, and the forms which for centuries had ceased to mean anything in Europe became the fundamental Russian tradition. Again, it is an anonymous art, and though provincial schools of icon painters developed slightly different means of treating the given themes, almost the only famous names among the painters of icons are those of Andrei Rublev (c.1365-1430), a monk of the Spas Andronievski Monastery in Moscow - noted for the Holy Trinity Icon (1411-25) - and Dionysius (c.1440-1502). The famous Madonna of Don Icon (c.1380, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) by Theophanes the Greek (c.1340-1410) shows how elementary and intense in feeling the icon could be at its all-time, and though as far as blueprint is concerned the whole schoolhouse seems to take developed out of itself (it is the but example of art based on art that did not immediately perish for lack of outside stimulus), the harmonization and distribution of colour in the best of the icons are amongst the most adventurous and subtle experiments in the history of painting.

Note: For more almost early Christian icon painting in Russia, come across:
- Russian Medieval Painting (c.950-1100)
- Novgorod School of Icon Painting (1100-1500)

Christian Romanesque Art in Western Europe

And then much for the eastern one-half of Europe. Meanwhile the continued social and political anarchy in the western one-half made information technology impossible for a parallel set up of traditions to evolve until much later. Over again, the development of a western European art was dependent on the edifice of churches. In the East there was no break in output between the final collapse of Rome and the ascent of Constantinople, but in the West in that location occurred a real hiatus filled only by the carving of a few stone crosses in Northumberland and on the Scottish border, or by a few gospel manuscripts from Republic of ireland or from Fundamental Europe. One has to wait for the advent of Romanesque architecture before the representational arts can observe a new point d'appui.

NOTE: Goldsmithing and precious metalwork were a Russian Byzantine speciality, equally practiced in Kiev (c.950-1237), where both cloisonné and niello enamelling were highly developed past Byzantine craftsmen.

Christmas 24-hour interval, 800, when Charlemagne attended Mass in St Peter's at Rome and was crowned past the Pope as head of the Holy Roman Empire, was a meaning day. Not that anything resembling unity in Western Europe was achieved by the symbolic effect, just after the twelvemonth 800 there was at least a potential rallying force for Western European culture as presently as information technology was ready to emerge. Charlemagne himself was an unashamed eclectic who could call up of nothing better to do for fine art than to produce a stone church in Aix-la-Chapelle based on San Vitale in Ravenna, to hire Byzantine mosaicists to fill it with decorations which have long since disappeared, and to base of operations his ornamental motifs on Irish gaelic illuminated manuscripts. It was not till the beginning of the eleventh century, ii hundred years after the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, that Romanesque architecture had evolved its own language.

It was a language of stone - a iii-dimensional language, whereas Byzantine was on the whole a language of brick, coated with ii-dimensional decoration. Like Byzantine art, the principal body of it is practical fine art. It belongs to the building and cannot be divorced from it. But being conceived of stone it consists largely of stone sculpture. Generally speaking, the nearer it approaches to the East the more apt it is to emphasize surface and take the form of low relief; the further Westward it penetrates, the solider and more fully rounded it becomes. But whether it is in low relief and consequently conceived as line, or statues in the round and therefore conceived as mass, information technology is essentially an art in which form counts rather than colour. This, of grade, is roughly true of all European as opposed to Oriental art, but the history of Romanesque art and its development into Gothic art (there seems to be no existent reason to separate the 2: they are phases of the same movement) is essentially the history of an art whose main business organisation was with shape.

What is more than noteworthy still is that it is an art with no centre of radiations, no main stream traceable to a definite source such as Nineveh or Knossus or Athens had been. In medieval Europe national boundaries were so fluid and national consciousness was so weak that cultural movements found no difficulty in flowing freely across them. (encounter as well: Medieval Christian Artworks and Medieval Artists.) Consequently i can find fully-developed expressions of the Romanesque and Gothic spirit in almost any corner of Western Europe at whatsoever moment. The facades of the Church of St Trophime at Arles in Provence, of the Cathedral of Chartres in north-western France, of the Cathedral of Santiago in Spain, of the Church of San Zeno in Verona are all variations on the same theme. Romanesque and Gothic art are dependent on the vast organization of the Catholic Church and not on the inspiration of a geographical middle as Florence was to exist later and equally Paris was until the leap of 1940.

As in Byzantine fine art, the output is enormous just anonymous. And, equally in Byzantine fine art, what nosotros accept to examine is a slowly changing mood rather than a succession of independent masterpieces. What characterizes the whole Romanesque motion is a perfect coordination between the carving and its architectural setting. The spacing of the statues on the facade of St Trophime, the richness of their surface contrasted with the shine stone wall in a higher place them, the mode in which they alternate rhythmically with the supporting columns of the overhanging porch, the distribution of the shadows, the controlled freedom of line give the heart a thrill of satisfaction. There is naught profound in this medieval sculpture, simply it invented a set of rhythms and textures which make archaic Greek sculpture look pedestrian by comparison. In no other catamenia can one detect such masses of etching, affectionate, and meticulous in particular, yet held together past a breadth of pattern that includes the whole carved area and enables the eye to take it in at a single glance.

Works reflecting the style of Christian art (Byzantine era) can exist seen in some of the nigh cute Eastern European churches and best art museums in the world.

Influence

The touch of the Byzantine style on later developments in European art was profound. See for case the Nerezi fresco murals at the modest Byzantine monastery Church of St. Panteleimon in Gorno Nerezi, Macedonia (1164), a beautifully sensitive and realistic series of wall paintings in the style of Comnenian Historic period Byzantine art. For more, run into: Pre-Renaissance Painting (c.1300-1400), which was founded largely by (on the ane paw) Giotto and the Florentine tradition, and (on the other) by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255-1319) of the Sienese School of painting.

• For the meaning of important oils, frescoes and tempera pictures, see: Famous Paintings Analyzed.
• For information about painting and sculpture, come across: Homepage.

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