Byzantium at the RA – Country Life review
The Byzantine Empire lasted for eleven centuries, although many of its artistic aims and techniques survived far longer in the orthodox churches of Greece, Russia and the Balkans. It remains, for all that, mysterious and self-contained. The art of the classical world emphasized balance and proportion. The Byzantines, in the main, rejected them. Byzantine art is intense, inward and specific, constructed around a religious world order that placed the Emperor on a par with Christ. It has never attained the heights of universality of its Greek forerunner.
The RA’s new exhibition is the first major outing of Byzantine art in Britain in fifty years, and its timing could not be better. The lofty mysticism of Byzantine art, its effort to penetrate and represent the holy and the transubstantial, was produced over what Hegel called a ‘thousand year story of crime, degeneracy and disgrace.’ This is by no means the modern view, but the seriousness of its art should appeal to us, when we find ourselves in the state of flux and doom that normally attended Byzantine history.
The empire’s capital, Constantinople, was founded in 330 AD. Justinian, who built the great church of Hagia Sophia in just six years in 532, ruled over a largely Greek-speaking empire that stretched from Iraq to the Crimea, and from the eastern to the western Mediterranean. The fortunes of the empire waned and waxed, but never again did it enjoy such widespread sovereignty. In 1054 came the Great Schism with a resurgent Rome, followed in 1204 by the sack of Constantinople by the Latin crusaders, and the final seizure of the city by the Turks in 1453. By then, of course, Byzantium was but a shadow of its former greatness, although its end also coincided with a flowering of art and letters.
Byzantine society was strictly hierarchic, both priestly and imperial. Like the Chinese, the Byzantines maintained the polite fiction that they were the centre of the universe and that all other people – the barbarians of old – were tributaries – an attitude that caused much bitterness in the West. Byzantine art, and architecture, too, worked for the state; so did orthodoxy with which it was bound up. Russians – Vikings, really – causing trouble? Bring them into Hagia Sophia and they would not know whether they were in heaven or on earth.
The effect of a great Byzantine church is partly wrought by that incomparable Byzantine artform, the mosaic, which Procopius described as ‘as if…the interior of the church possesses a source of light’, and renaissance painters admired as ‘pitture per l’eternita’, or paintings for eternity. The earliest of these grand mosaics is actually in Rome, at the 5th century church of Santa Pudenziana, in which a huge image of the bearded Christ fills the semi dome of the apse; it became the standard treatment for churches in the east. One need only imagine the vastness of St Mark’s in Venice translated into the even larger spaces of Hagia Sophia to understand the awe it inspired. These huge compositions were in fact colossal icons for veneration - a practise which, it seems, stemmed directly from classical traditions.
As Liz James writes in the catalogue, ‘within the church, architecture, imagery, the liturgy, as well as sights, smells and sounds including voices, incense, smoke and candle-wax, heat and bodies, hard polished floors, glittering materials, all combined…to translate the church into heaven, in order to move being ‘at church’ to being ‘with God’.’
Historians may endlessly debate the currents and traditions that informed the art. Veneration came from the classical Graeco-Roman world; its nemesis, iconoclasm, was first proclaimed in 726 by Leo III, shortly after Caliph Yazid had himself restated the Islamic ban on human images. Iconoclasm was a tragedy, a cataclysm second only to the sack of Constantinople in 1204; but then the eye turns to the beautiful decorative capitals that adorn so many churches…
This exhibition contains few monumental works, of course, but it is no less rich for all that. Debates aside, in the end one is overwhelmed by the spiritual beauty and energy of the work, where human artists created and celebrated the panoply of the divine, giving us glimpses of that crowded, calm, accepting world in which suffering was redeemed and boom and bust were exploded as irrelevance.
