Early Christian Art
Romanesque
Gothic Art
Medieval Art

Byzantine Art

 

Introduction

Byzantium is the name given by scholars to the Eastern division of the Roman Empire from around 300 to the time when Constantinoble was conquered by the Moslem Turks after the Renaissance. So Byzantine art spans all of the late Roman Empire through all the Middle Ages. Keep in mind that Byzantium and Byzantine are not words that the people of Constantinoble used to describe where they lived or what they called their art; these words are modern scholarly inventions which refer back to the name of a town that was renamed Constantinoble. The people of Constantinoble thought of themselves as living in the capital of the Roman Empire, in which the state religion was Christianity. For your own amusement try thinking up an adjective that means "from Constantinoble" and you can begin to see why Byzantium was used as the base.

The Christian church divided East/West -- the same as Rome divided; and just as the Eastern Emperors thought of themselves as the legitimate owners of all of the empire, so the Eastern church saw itself as the legitimate descendants of Christ's authority. The traditions of this Eastern Christian religion live on today in the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church. It is still dominant in the areas that the Byzantine Empire occupied: Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, the Near East, and Western Russia

Coptic Art

Coptic art is the art of Christian North Africa and the Near East. Egyptian traditions, including traditions in art, exerted a strong pull on the culture of the Coptic peoples. Coptic is a language that is still spoken in churches in Egypt and it is a direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian language.

Third Century

Funerary Portrait on a Coffin Egypt-Faiyum about 200 Pushkin Museum, Moscow

This is clearly a continuation of the Greek funerary portrait tradition that developed in the Faiyum in Ptolemaic times. See the Greco-Roman period of Egyptian art to see other similar examples.

Note the similarity between this "Egyptian" portrait and the Coptic/Byzantine icons shown below.

Later Periods of Coptic Art

Byzantine Art (From the Eastern Roman Empire)

Fourth and Fifth Centuries

At the beginning of the Fourth Century the Christian Church was just beginning to get itself organizationally straightened out. It was also dealing with theological problems that seemed unresolvable. The Roman state was in a period of heavy persecution of the Christians and there were plenty of knotty theological/political problems. One of the major problems was if the church excommunicates an individual or a group, can he ever be reunited with the church? This was current church doctrine, but it threatened to split the church into pieces that could then never be rejoined, threatening the stability of the whole.

Then there were the Christian groups that believed the Devil was an anti-god with roughly equal powers to the Christian God, several other heresies were also prevalent. So setting a common theology for church belief needed to be started. It was centuries before most of these heresies were wiped out and sometime the conflict resulted in holy war. In this political climate the first church synod was convened in Nicea, Bythenia. The Church still occasionally calls synods today to resolve modern challenges to Church doctrine.

But political power was about to turn toward the Christians.

Constantine the Great
about 325

Constantine the Great
Flavius Valerius Constantinus

born: Naissus, Moesia [now Niš, Yugoslavia.]; 27 Feb. some time after 280
died: Ancyrona, near Nicomedia, Bithynia [now Izmit, Turkey]; 22 May 337

Constantine worked his way up the Imperial ladder by political maneuvering and a well trained army. After twenty years of fighting various forces all over the Roman Empire, he finally confronts Licinius, a co-emperor and former ally. As the story goes the night before the battle he is visited by an angel who shows him a cross and tells him to lead his men into battle with this symbol. Thus he won, and in 324 he became the single Emperor, governing both the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire. This story is called Constantine's Dream and becomes a subject for church art, showing a modern miracle.

Constantine attributed his successes to this support from his Christian God. A triumphal arch in Rome ascribed his victory to the “Inspiration of the Divinity”. A statue showed Constantine holding a cross with the legend: “By this saving sign I have delivered your city from the tyrant and restored liberty to the Senate and people of Rome.”

In 325, the Christian Church convened the Council of Nicaea (in Bythinia along the Black Sea) to treat some of the outstanding theological problems and bring a little more organization to the church. Constantine gave the opening speech to the assembly; he supported reuniting with heretical groups once they had rejoined the true path. This issue was not resolved at this synod, nor was it resolved for more than half a century after he died.

The Council coincided almost exactly with the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the reign of Constantine. The Bishops attending the Council were also participants in those celebrations, which took place in Byzantium, that is not far from Nicaea.

The next year Constantine visited Rome to repeat the celebrations. This visit brought a personal crisis: during his absence from Constantinoble, for reasons that still remains unknown, Constantine had his eldest son, the deputy emperor Crispus, and his own wife Fausta, Crispus' stepmother, slain.

Nor was the visit to Rome a success. Constantine's declined to take part in a pagan procession and offended the Roman people. He never returned to Rome.

In late 326 or early 327, Constantine's mother, Helena, embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Perhaps to atone for the family killings. Upon reaching Jerusalem, on Helena believed she had found the Holy Sepulture. On 3 May she claimed to have recovered the cross on which Christ had been crucified.

This relic, be it the real thing or not, is called the "True Cross"; this is a technical term, not necessarily a descriptive one. Constantine distributed pieces of the True Cross to monasteries and churches throughout the empire. Some say there is more wood in True Cross relics than in a hundred crosses. Constantine also helped design and pay for the building of a new church in Jerusalem, at the spot of the discovery. Helena was later canonized by the Church. May third was celebrated in the church calendar until 1960 when Pope John XXIII removed it.

Constantine's interest in church building was expressed also at Constantinoble, particularly in churches of the Holy Wisdom (the original Hagia Sophia) and of the Apostles. At Rome, the great church of St. Peter was begun in the later 320s and lavishly endowed by Constantine. Churches at Trier, Aquileia, Cirta in Numidia, Nicomedia, Antioch, Gaza, Alexandria, and elsewhere owed their development, directly or indirectly, to Constantine's support.

In 330, Constantine renamed Byzantium: Constantinoble, and he made it the capital of the Roman Empire. Rome as a capitol had long been out of favor with the Emperors, but now the decree made the move permanent. The new capital, Byzantium/Constantinoble/Istanbul, is a city at the cusp of the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus. It is currently the capital of Turkey

Constantine wanted to be baptized in the Jordan River, but he delayed baptism until the end of his life. While preparing a war against Persia he fell ill at Helenopolis. When medical treatment failed, he tried to return to Constantinoble but he was too weak to complete the journey, in Nicomedia he received a Christian baptism, and he died there in 337. He was buried in a Christian Church he had founded in Constantinoble.

Constantine the Great was the first Roman emperor to be a Christian. He pushed the empire towards becoming a Christian state. Changing the empire could not be done all at once -- the empire was too big, and Christianity was still too politically unpopular. But the Christian Church strengthened immeasurably when it became backed by the political power of the Roman state.

Sixth and Seventh Centuries

ICONS

Icons are pieces of art which become holy themselves. From very close to the beginning of the Christian church there has always been a split between those that favor one god and those that favor many. The doctrine of the Trinity is a compromise between those competing political factions within the church. The worship of the Virgin and saints can be seen as idol worship, and in part, this became one celebrated cause for the Reformation, and the creation of Protestant Christian churches. Icons violate at least the spirit of a single god, and therefore they have always been part of this controversy.

Icons have been a strong part of the Eastern Christian Church. And therefore, they have been an important part of Byzantine art. Icons take many forms. They can be small for home or personal use, or large for church use. They are usually painted images on wood. But icons for church use can be mosaics or large pictures decorated with with precious stones and jewels.

At times the one-god faction of the church, sometimes called iconoclasts, have become so dominant and repressive they have searched out and destroyed icons as pagan idol worship. In fact, in the mistaken belief that statues of Kings in churches were idols, they have often destroyed the sculptures (These are some left over heads in the Cluny Mediæval Museum in Paris resulting from such a rampage in the 14th century.)

Many believers, in all ages, have used icons to give them a more personal holy object. This human response to art is part of the fundamental magic that makes all art endure.

A small personal note: Praying to icons does not just belong to the middle ages. In the mid 1980s I was visiting Mt. Athos, Greece when a Dutch tourist related a story to me that had happened to him that day. He had been walking toward the monastery where we were staying that night, and he met a monastic hermit along the road. The hermit had an icon with him to which he stopped and prayed frequently. My friend, using a Polaroid instant camera, took a picture of the icon. He showed the monk the developing picture -- who firmly believed that it was a miracle. The monk would then not part with the resulting Polaroid picture. When my friend left, the monk was praying to the newly developed Polaroid image. [ed.]

More Byzantine art from 700 to the Renaissance.

Early Christian Art
Romanesque
Gothic Art
Medieval Art