Overview of Early Christian and Byzantine Art - Christian Art History

Introduction to Early Christian and Byzantine Art

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a) Overview of Early Christian and Byzantine Art
b) The Meaning of The Icon in Early Christian and Byzantine Art

Overview of Early Christian Art and Byzantine Art*

Until about a hundred-and-fifty years ago the art of the Early Christian and Byzantine period was almost entirely ignored. From 1590 onwards when Bosio and his team of archaeologists uncovered the catacombs in Rome, historians, theologians and other scholars collected and published the inscriptions, paintings and mosaics they found. But these were never considered as works of art; they were generally looked upon as productions representative of the last and decadent phase of the Ancient World. This ignorance and misunderstanding of Early Christian and Byzantine art until comparatively recently is due to a variety of circumstances.

Most of the European and Middle Eastern territory where the art of this period developed, fell and remained under the subjection of alien rulers, who for many centuries made visits and studies by scholars and travellers difficult. Greece and the Balkan countries were certainly
visited by Western travellers as early as the sixteenth century but it was only much later that a systematic and objective exploration of certain of the Asiatic territories of Byzantium became possible.

Travellers such as the Englishman George Wheler and the Frenchman, Jacob Spon, did, however, appreciate the greatness of Byzantine art when they discovered it in, for instance, the Monastery of Hosios Loukas near Delphi in Greece. It is difficult, however, to determine whether they really understood the ideas that Byzantine artists had aimed at expressing. In a paper on "Byzantine art and Western Medieval taste", read at the Byzantine Congress in Athens in 1966, Steven Runciman maintained that the objects of Byzantine art that
are recorded as having been admired in the West, were admired for their material, spiritual, or practical worth, but not for their beauty. Unfortunately there is far more evidence for the existence of outright prejudice and misconception concerning Byzantine art. One of the main reasons for this was the hostility of the Catholic Church towards the Greek Orthodox Church after the break between the Church of Rome and the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1054. The Catholics of Rome henceforth regarded the "Orthodox" as schismatics and suspected them of heresy.

The Crusades later brought Westerners and Greeks into close contact, but there is evidence of much disagreement, and open antagonism. There were basic differences of mentality. The Crusaders, whose chief quality lay in their military strength, distrusted and envied rather than admired and appreciated the richer and more refined civilization of the Byzantines. This distrust and envy certainly contributed to the unfavourable view of the Byzantine Empire for so many centuries in the West.

In France, during the seventeenth century, there arose a sudden interest in the Byzantine Empire. It was restricted, however, to Byzantine historical achievements. To Voltaire in the so-called "age of enlightenment", Byzantine civilization was a worthless collection of oracles and miracles ...a disgrace to the human mind. To him and others Byzantium was a synonym for decadence, a mere parody of the Roman Empire in the days of its splendour and, in terms of civilization, no more than the long drawn out, decline of classical antiquity.

Vischer, the German aesthetician of the nineteenth century, found the images of Byzantine saints to resemble mummies. Even Schopenhauer rejected Christian art because it was not based on the "lintel upon post" system of the Greeks. The Neo-Classicists had such prejudices and so confined an aesthetic judgment that they debarred the appreciation of anything at all different in form of Classical
prototypes. Even the Romantics who rediscovered the beauty of Gothic monuments, paid little attention to works of art from the Early Christian and Byzantine world.

The French historian, Diderot, in the mid-eighteenth century, was the first "modern'" authority to treat Byzantine art seriously; but it was Millet, as late as 1916, who first seriously refuted the unfavourable views of his predecessors and made possible an objective evaluation of the art of the late Byzantine period.

The rediscovery of the greatness of El Greco (seen by some as the last great Byzantine artist) by critics of the twentieth century, headed by Roger Fry, contributed greatly to a growth in appreciation of the true significance of Byzantine art. Note that with the tendency in Western art towards two-dimensionality, stylisation and a timelessness of expression around 1900, artists art historians had already begun to develop a new interest not only in "primitive" and Archaic art, but also in the art of the Early Christians and Byzantines.

As a result of the misconceptions which prevented an objective evaluation of Early Christian Byzantine art, a large Baroque organ was, for instance, placed in front of the now most famous mosaics on the walls of S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, causing considerable damage. In S. Vitale, the dome was covered with second-rate frescoes, and the area around the altar was cluttered with heavy Baroque furnishings. In the many European museums established around 1800, Early Christian sarcophagi lay largely in storerooms, forgotten.

Nevertheless, after 1830 when a group of Roman archaeologists began systematic excavations of the catacombs, some interest was aroused in these burial sites and travellers began to include them in their tours. They found them historically interesting, but still failed to see them as works of art. They viewed them with the eyes of the conventional admirer of Ancient Greece and Rome and so classified them as belonging to a period of decline and decadence. What had remained of the Roman Empire had, in their opinion, become arid, contorted and deformed. Byzantine was a synonym for "lifeless" and "stereotype". Scholars like Edward Gibbon in his 'Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (first published in 1788)', contributed to this view when he Described Byzantine civilization as a long story of decadence. Early Christian monuments were regarded as the artifacts of a degenerate culture and their innovative features were ignored. Scholars immediately sought for resemblances to Classical models and thus considered the severe stylisation that characterised some of this art, for instance, the result of incompetence, describing it as a barbarous lack of form. They were unable to see this art as the expression of an original artistic vision in which an entirely new content was linked with a distinctive new form.

It has now become clear that Byzantine art cannot be seen with the eyes of the conventional admirer of Antiquity. Neither can superficial comparisons between the work of art of these two periods, nor an account of their individual historical evolution, reveal their inherent differences satisfactorily. It must be understood that Byzantine art is the expression of the sublime and not of beauty in the classical sense at all. A mere descriptive analysis misses the essence of its aesthetic character. While (speaking for the Classical period) Aristotle claimed that "beauty consists of size and order" and emphasised ideal balance, serenity and harmony, Byzantine art is dynamic and expresses the transcendental and eternal.

Classical man lived in harmony with his surroundings, but the man of the Middle East and the European of post-Classical times looked beyond them. He did not find his salvation in this world, but turned away from it to the transcendental. This new world, and the understanding of it, demanded an entirely new mode of artistic expression. Where the harmony of the beautiful allows us serene and calm contemplation, the dynamism of the sublime demands our subjective, spiritual participation. It is the negation of the world's apparent harmony. Where the beautiful is concerned with the visible, the sublime attempts to make visible the invisible. It is turned inwards and does not hesitate even before apparent formlessness and distortion. The visible world must indeed be abstracted or stripped of its material connotations, in order to embody and express spiritual values.

The fact that Byzantine artists made use of Hellenistic and pagan elements does not lessen their inherent irreconcilability. Byzantine art is mystical in principle. The Classical and ideal athlete is followed by the Byzantine ascetic, whose observation of nature is subordinate to contemplation of the Divine.

*Based on notes compiled by Karin M. Skawran for the University of South Africa.

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