My American Lectures/Problems of Byzantine Art, and the Art of S. E. Europe
PROBLEMS OF BYZANTINE ART, AND THE ART OF SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE
Excellent histories on Byzantine art have been written, from the comprehensive work of Charles Diehl to the successful attempt by Louis Brehier to write a new one. Their authors have succeeded, with much skill, in presenting an uninterupted narrative of its development in all its aspects. Nevertheless, long periods are wholly unknown, partly owing to the destruction of documents, to fierce conquest or internal disturbance, as when iconoclasts fought against iconodoules, and partly because whole provinces, particularly in Asia—though also in Europe—were never explored. All gaps have been filled in and the impression given is of a connected tale, but in spite of this ability, which has now become a tradition in the compilation of such works, capital problem remain unsolved and an endeavour will be made here to set them at their true values.
The first is the hard one of origins themselves.
Is is admitted that Byzantine society created none of the elements which form this rich and brilliant synthesis of art. Nothing is owed to new inspirations; no particular note of a new race is struck; there is no influence of a special milieu, no discovery due to the existence of an artist of genius, all we can trace in the development of Byzantine civilization being the presence of able writers and perfect technicians, all seeking to give greater proportions to borrowed models. Roman, Greek and Oriental art united to give that interesting blend: the Byzantine. And, because everything was subjected to the State, progress, under the aegis of the proud Eastern Empire, was possible.
This is surely so in the case of technique. From the Roman, Byzantium took, if only for a moment, the form of the basilica, with its three longitudinal divisions, with the apses of the judge, to which two others were adjoined, with lofty tribunes. Something, too, of the Greek sense of proportion was instinctively maintained, but for the most part these technical elements are of Oriental origin.
If an eminent researcher in matters of architectural technique is to be believed, this origin was mainly an Armenian one, It is true that Mr. Strzygowski, wholly reversing his doctrines, now sees in the wooden dwellings of the north, if not also in the tents of the nomad, the origin of all towns, and their builders to be the originators of the models which were later adopted by the nations building in marble, thus relegating these to the place of mere copyists. But Armenia, the ancient and the great, was never anything else but—after the tradition of Urartu—a refuge for the imperial Persian tradition, not so much a country aspiring to wider frontiers and a capital of its own, therefore unable to achieve either a period of definite crystallisation. From the moral point of view she was never able to virtualise the qualities of a strictly determined nation. The role which she played in the history of the Orient, in which she had so interesting a mission, was to collect the memories of the great eastern empires and to transmit them to the western, the Anatolian and the Byzantine.
The love of finely-worked detail, the necessity of invoking the aid of polychromy, the use of widely diverse materials to obtain strange and new effects by their combination, the splendour, variety, richness and gorgeous display is a particular characteristic of Mesopotamian, as well as Syrian and Egyptian artistic civilisation.
A historical synthesis was created in these countries, to which each of the nations representing eastern civilisation had contributed something purely its own. Byzantium, then newly-created (comparable with the transformation, in our own times, by Mustapha Kemal of the erstwhile historical village of Angora into the capital of an aspiring and vigorous nation) was not able to maintain competition with this accumulation of treasures, forming a perfect artistic unity: the art wich followed in the train of Constantine was not sufficient to vanquish this overwhelming rivalry. As the new Roman Empire was and remained open to all forms of borrowed art, so it took this, the most costly of all, as it would have taken any other. And by this adoption it felt no humiliation, any more than there was humiliation to be found in the use of the Greek tongue for an unchanging church, in the use of the political form of government, of law, of literature. Everything was tribute to the Empire, everything formed a part of its rights and patrimony, once acquired by conquest. If the Latin competitors could have been vanquished by a series of victories, their French or Italian language, their mediaeval thought, and their art too would have been a portion of the war-prizes of Byzantium.
An oriental ornamentation, an exclusively oriental ornamentation, in a style which began 4.000 years before, as witness the palaces and cemeteries of Ur, a dome applied to solid Roman buildings of cheap brick, covered only by costly polychromatic marbles, and all expressed in the ancient Hellenic values of proportion, this is, compressed into a simple formula and without the mouthing of pseudo-scientific rhetoric, Byzantine art. Successive new discoveries in Western Asia will merely tend to point the moral.
The second problem consists in the phases of the art. Such phases in the transmission of an art can equally be determined by archaeological or scientific discovery, or by the initiative of superior intelligence, no less than by practical usage and revolutions of thought.
But no great technical discovery took place in the millenium of Byzantine existence. It seems that the crowning of a basilica with a cupola had already been realised in Asia before the opening of the new Constantinopolitan era. The celebrated architects of Justinian failed in building the cupola of Hagia Sofia not because it was the first attempt—in which case it would not have been made with the costly materials necessary for an imperial basilica—but because the dimensions were so great as to bewilder them. No such catastrophe attended the efforts of an artist in the west, an unknown artist in the Île-de-France, to transmit the weight of the dome not to the outer walls, which could thus be carved in the most refine dand apparently dangerous manner, but to independent buttresses.
I have affirmed that genius was not to be found in those countries where everything was a mere matter of teaching, a traditional transmission, where no revolution could occur except in the struggle for power, the riots of the amphitheatre or the brawls of the street.
A new current of ideas, however, was introduced by iconoclasm, tending to purify the orthodoxy of all suspicion of idolatry in an epoch when the abstract creed of Islam was impressive to many minds. A complete change was enforced by the two epochs of triumph in this direction. The icons disappeared from the public life of the people, notwithstanding that in private life they were maintained, so that in remote corners of the provinces the technical skill of fashioning them was never lost. No reproduction of the human figure was permitted, and it was perhaps in this moment that sculpture itself, hitherto allowed, was expressly prohibited. The classical models, never forgotten or omitted from the ornamental, as is shown by the miniature still extant, were still more cherished: a new form of ornamentation, of fruit and suchs of heroic episodes, as on the pagan sepulchres, of historical processions, and surely also of such abstract lines as in the Mohammedan temples, was introduced and maintained. The old usages returned at the moment when the worshippers of holy images gained the power, and very little of the official art, cultivated for some decades, remained. And this is all which was brought forth by such changes of mind. The great revolution represented by the school of Bardas, by the research of Photius and by the literary works of Psellos was not greatly felt in the development of an art which seems to have found in ornaments novelties merely of a secondary importance.
The great influence for the new type of architecture came only from the ever-increasing importance of monastic bodies. The spiritual needs of the members of a monastery were esentially different from those in a city where all ritual was to be celebrated within the walls of a great basilica. The body of the church itself, frequented at most by a few neighbouring peasants, had no reason for preserving exaggerated proportions: the choir became the most important part of the structure, where the brothers could assemble to sing; on this part the light had to be concentrated, and not on the pews above, or on the «ship» beneath. Later, an open porch, an exonarthex, was necessary for receiving the public, who were not commonly admitted to the interior. A mystic sentiment gave preference to the constant recurrence of the cross and the cruciform rather than the rectilinear features of the basilica, contrived by the introduction of interior vaulting and later extended to the external lines of the building too. Such is the church on Mount Athos, of the provincial convents and monasteries in the remoter districts which end by encroaching on the capital itself. As the number of smaller houses of prayer for small communities of monks increased, this type became general and transmissible to the neighbouring realms of Byzantine imitation.
This is why the periods of this art cannot be established.
First, under Constantine, and then under his succesors, we come across no attempt, in the course of two whole centuries, to delineate the uniform Byzantine church or palace: the Roman tradition is still too strong. All means were employed to maintain this tradition in art as well as in legislation, upon coins, in the law-academy of Beyrouth, in the armies, in certain works of literature (as in the memoirs of Ammianus Marcellinus, at a period when the emperor Julian was the imitator of the ancient Hellene Lukianos). Thus Constantinople was, by the will of its founder, as regards the Empire, much as Aachen was for Charles the Great, a heap of carted furniture.
The second epoch is represented by Justinian and his immediate successors up to the growth of Islamitic influence. It was no slow preparation for a magnificent, amazing burgeoning. The Queen of Sheba had come to present her thousand gifts to imperial Solomon who enjoyed this munificence and considered it as due to his high rank. The Roman foundation remained, but the Orient wastefully lavished on its pure lines all the accumulated treasures of a long train of years.
To hinder a return of iconoclasm, of this insolent intrusive intrusive revolt, the army of the new monks was formed, a phenomenon as important for Byzantium as was for the West the substitution of the forces of Benedict by the powerful legions of the Dominicans and the wandering friars of St. Francis. The monk was no longer, as in early Christian times, a hermit, a lover of desert places, a yogi striving to suppress all that was human in himself. He was no longer to be an element of unrest in the towns, ready to foment or suppress a riot. His goal was to have his own stronghold, with a miltary organisation and discipline, prepared to fight and preach, ad libitum, against the enemies of the church. He dwells on inaccessible rocks, as on the Holy Mountain or on the peaks of the Thessalonian mountains.
In their retreat they were at the same time architects, sculptors, painters, theologians, historians, poets. All manner of combat was thus at their disposal. A whole epoch lay to their hands. A hermit, Athanasius, and an emperor, Nicephore Phocas, gave their patronage to the community.
But the Latin Empire intervened, causing Greek retreats in the valleys of Asia Minor, at Nicaea, at Trebizond, under the mountain of Epirus. By their return the Byzantines had no longer the old power to avert foreign influences. These came now from the West, a wholly changed West, which was over-populated, full of energy and of faith in its future, from the west of successful crusades, of prosperous Italian commerce, which had colonised the eastern shores of the Mediterranean with its occidental lords, kings of Jerusalem, Dukes of Antioch, Counts of Tripoli and Edessa. The wives of the emperors came from this Latin eastern world, from Italy, from lesser German principalities. The character of these eastern dynasts was, as for Manuel Comnene, that of a warrior knight, proud of personal risk and adventurous exploits.
In art too a change was to be observed. Architecture began to favour the palace of the emperor, which ascended to the heights of the Magnaura. The lines of religious edifices were no more to be modified, but the ornamental was to change. Occidental influences were to be traced in painting. The icon-style was no longer the same in the celebrated monastery of St. Duke, and similar influences were found in remote parts of the Macedonian districts during the nth and 12th centuries. So too, in the 14th century, the mosaics of the Kahrie Djamissi in Constantinople, the pictures of Mistra, and the corresponding painting in the Wallachian Argeș, present expressive figures, overlaid with an all-pervading realism.
A discussion was commenced on the origins of this change which is also to be found in Italian art, Siena, in common with Byzantium, having the same methode of presenting the Madonna and the Saints. Which of either is the teacher and which the pupil? The solution is to be found in the fact that the majority of the Italian merchants resided for a time in Constantinople and various oriental cities, and that analogous political and social forms existed for more than three centuries in the east.
And now, at least, what is the ultimate limit of this Byzantine art?
We speak of Serbian or Bulgarian art, in the sense of national products. This is erroneous. All art produced within the theoretical boundaries of the Empire, as far West as the Adriatic and East to the Danube, is Byzantine. Nothwithstanding occidental elements to be traced in such Serbian monasteries as Studenitza, with its carved frescoes after Italo-Dalmatian models, the Byzantine is ubiquitous: the money and the patronage alone belongs to the new States.
And Roumania, with its elements of Gothic, of Renaissance and of French influence?
Had Byzantium been a closed synthesis, Roumanian art would have been different from the Byzantine. But the Byzantine synthesis remained ever fresh, and in this sense it includes all that which, with additional elements, has been accomplished by the Roumanians.