Early Byzantine Art

The following video is about the

early

period of Byzantine art, moving on to Constantinople, which becomes modern-day Istanbul, so we will focus on the

early

Byzantine period, which is from 324 to 726 AD. or A.D. This is the period of Constantine, which we have already focused on, so we will move on to Constantine, Justinian and what is considered "The Golden Age of Justinian", when the Byzantine Empire reaches a very large extent until the period. of "iconoclasm", when there will be a period in which religious images will be systematically destroyed, so we will focus on that at the end.

To start, just a reminder from Constantine, as we see it here. Constantine moves the imperial capital to the east. Moving you to Constantinople, which had been "Byzantium". He calls it "Constantinople", after himself. Today it is known as Istanbul. So this movement... this great movement occurs in the year 330 CE. We see here the portrait of Constantine from the Basilica Nova in Rome just to remind you what the portrait of him looked like. So, just a few things to keep in mind as we delve into the Byzantine Empire. First of all, the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire refer to themselves as Romans.

They did not consider themselves different from the Romans who inhabited the city of Rome. They saw themselves as continuators of the Roman Empire. So the outsiders referred to them as "Greeks" - so they inhabited that eastern portion of the Mediterranean - so the outsiders referred to them as Greeks, but they saw themselves as continuators of the Roman Empire and in fact, at first the official language was Latin, which was the language of the Roman Empire in Rome, but later it will become Greek, and we start to see more and more Greek being used for documents and manuscripts and things like that, as we learn . proceed or as we progress into the Byzantine period.

So let's zoom in on Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, and we'll see that there's a horn shape here, and it's a great city or a great location in terms of protection as well as trade. You can see it's deep in this area, but it connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, so you have a good location there. It links Asia Minor to Europe, so you have that good connection there too. Therefore, it is a really ideal commercial location and also ideal in terms of protection. So Constantinople will be defeated a few times (some foreigners will come in and take power on certain occasions), but it won't fall until 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, so that will happen much, much later.

This is partly because it really did have an ideal location. And the idea, once they got to Constantinople, was to create a city that was indistinguishable from Rome, so that it had many of the entertainment features of Rome, the amenities of Rome, the places of worship of Rome, of course in the new Christian religion, however. We no longer have some of the temples we have seen previously. Now religious structures will be churches. Then we will see in this area, near the Imperial Palace, the construction of Hagia Sophia, which will be our key church for today. Just a few details here: In Justinian's golden age, he ruled from 527 to 565, so we're pretty far along.

The capital city of Constantinople. It can be seen that he expanded the empire quite a bit by going west, and this, of course, is very expensive. It costs a lot of money, so it is trying to take over areas that have been taken over by groups like the Vandals, Ostrogoths and other groups. So he is trying to reclaim lands that had previously been part of the Roman Empire. It had a historian named Procopius. There were secret stories and official stories, and one of the most intriguing parts of these stories is that of his wife Theodora, who becomes an important figure during his rule.

She was known to be a prostitute/actress before marrying Justinian, but he later became enchanted with her. Justinian created this impressive Public Works program. One of the most important, after what became known as the "Nika riots", was Hagia Sophia or the Church of Holy Wisdom, so today it has been greatly modified since the time of Justinian by the addition of minarets when it was converted into a mosque after the Ottoman Turks inhabited Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul. Then the minarets we added. Also, the dome is not the original dome; We'll talk more about that in just a second.

The dome is not the same one that was first created by the two architects employed by Justinian, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. These individuals were scholars. They had never built anything of this size and in fact it was built in about five years, which is really incredible - the speed at which something is built on this side is unprecedented. So you can see some of the shapes of the buttresses or buttresses, the huge dome in the center, the subsidiary domes that extend out and would add support because this dome would need a lot of support because it is so large.

When we look at the plan, we see that it has a Greek cross, which means that the arms of the cross are approximately the same size. This is a huge church, very, very important, so you have things like a double narthex or a double entrance. You would have had an atrium in front. You have a huge space for the Christian liturgy or ritual to take place. Then you have this area of ​​what would be the "nave" or the "naos". You have the side hallways here. You have the apse towards the back. Everything here is done on a very, very large scale and instead of the Latin plane where you tend to have that really longitudinal plane, that really long nave, here the emphasis is much more vertical, right?

Because you are looking up at this dome and your eyes are being drawn upward, when we look in you can see that the dome really is the main attraction. You can see the light coming in from below, the smaller domes to the side. You can see there's a gold mosaic up here, suggesting the heavens and the celestial elements and then the marble and the earthly realm below, but they're still beautiful materials. Later, they started adding images, Christian images, but during the time of Justinian, they were really aniconic or they avoided depicting sacred figures. The way the dome is supported is by pendentives, which we see here, basically curved triangles that move between the square base and the curved dome.

And the first dome was quite flat, more of what we would call a "plate dome" rather than a bowl, and it actually collapsed. The church began to sag, and later, another architect, one of the original architects' nephews, came in and created a dome with a higher pitch, which pushed the weight toward the ground, instead of having as much weight pushing down. in the middle. That's Hagia Sophia, a very, very famous structure. Now we head to Ravenna: Ravenna was the western capital of the empire and Justinian managed to retake it from the Ostrogoths in 539. If we focus on the church of San Vitale, this church was dedicated by a bishop in 547: Bishop Maximianius, to who we will see inside.

It has extensive mosaics like Hagia Sophia: gold mosaics on top, marble on the bottom, again separating the heavenly and the terrestrial. You see Christ right here in the center, beardless, wearing a purple garment that suggests royalty and authority. You have the figure of the original bishop Ecclesius, who was the bishop when it was first founded, presenting a small model, and then you have a figure of San Vitale, of "Saint Vitalis", the individual who was a martyr, and for whom this church was named. Towards the right side – or the upper side – of Christ is Justinian. So Justinian is here with what we call a "nimbus" - it looks like a halo - it's a suggestion of authority, power and importance.

He looks a lot like Christ here right in the center. He has Christ-like followers around him, somewhat like his own apostles. He has what look like warriors, men who are soldiers, men of war, but who hold the Chi-Rho, so that was an important symbol of Constantine, the first letters of Christ's name in Greek. Justinian is clearly differentiated here with his purple robe, and he is holding the paten or a container to carry the bread, which will be used for the liturgy, and then there is Maximianius, who is the individual who will be the bishop when the church is finished.

He is probably a person who helped pay for the church. And then you have other elements of the liturgy: you see the book, you have the incense, all of that is indicated here. Justinian probably never came to this church, but here he is symbolically pictured, a reminder of his power. And then on the opposite side we have Theodora and her attendants, and she carries the chalice or the cup, so she will also participate, and you can see that she is probably outside in the atrium, outside, you know, in church. atrium and they tell her that it is time to enter, and removing the curtain from her, she is dressed in equally fine garments, easy to identify, with very flat figures, similar to those we saw in Dura Europas. , but she remembers that through candle lighting, these figures would look much more three-dimensional.

So now we have to move on to monasticism and think about this period of "iconoclasm", when people were destroying images, so we will see that the production of icons became very popular in the early Byzantine period and in places like the monastery of Saint Catherine, who we see here, protecting some of those icons, so the Monastery of Saint Catherine was very isolated, so many of the icons or images there survived. So just a brief introduction about "monasticism", it is a compound for monks. The individual in charge is known as "The Abbot." Monks were meant to live a life of austerity, far from the temptations of the city, although we begin to see monasteries in the medieval period becoming increasingly luxurious.

We'll talk about that later. Typically seen are residential cells for monks, a dining room or "refectory", a monastic church and then a guest house for pilgrims, especially places like Mount Sinai, which were considered very sacred. So the icons that survive from the early Byzantine period are quite few and far between, and most of them survive at St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, so one example is the "Theotokos" or the Virgin as God-bearer, and this it's something she was declared or a role she was declared to occupy from the beginning. So you see it here, functioning almost like a throne.

Christ here in his lap. They are both looking to the side, so the idea here is that you should engage with the image in your gaze. You would look and pray to these two saints. So, you have Theodore and George, these two saints here. So, you look up to them in your prayer, and they are supposed to be the intercessors who will convey your message to the Virgin, and then, of course, you see the divine influence with the little hand coming down from above. Another famous icon is this icon of Christ, also from the Monastery of Saint Catherine, and this is another one that you will commit to being through your eyes.

You will look at it while praying, perhaps put a candle in front of it, incense, and all this will help the icon come to life. And the idea here is that it represents the true image of these sacred figures. This is the closest you will really get to these sacred figures, through these icons. So just a quick reminder that we had a second commandment that people thought about, which people were worried about, so having these icons leads to this iconoclastic period. In this period, in 726, Leo III prohibited representing the divine, however, approximately 120 years later, this destruction of images was condemned, so for about 120 years no images of sacred figures or images would be produced.

They are being destroyed, so many of these icons do not survive, something very unfortunate for art historians, so there are these iconoclasts who would systematically go through and destroy these images, so unfortunately we have lost a lot of the early Byzantine icons. heritage, artistic heritage, cultural heritage, but it's a really interesting period in terms of this idea that images became very dangerous, that they were too close to becoming idols, that these icons that were thought to represent the divine were treated as idols and people prayed to them with great devotion. Sometimes people would take off pieces of paint believing that they would have special powers, that these icons functioned almost like these divine figures, so we'll keep that in mind as we move into the period of Islamic art, which you see next!