The decline of civic culture outside the contrastingly booming life centered on urban churches is marked by the rarity of new secular public buildings, public inscriptions, and honorific statues to local councilors. Those statues which are erected are often to the new power-foci, the governors and other imperial officials, who with the bishop were largely responsible for regional management in the Late Empire. Statues in Athens to the prefect Herculius can be matched by crude statues of generals from Corinth, one being identified interestingly as of Germanic origin. Vanderpool (2003) notes that LR statues from both towns use recycled marble from older works.
In palaces, town houses, suburban villas, and the larger rural villas, Roman naturalistic art flourished amongst the prosperous upper-class communities of the Middle to Later Roman Empire in Greece. This same style was adopted by the first Christian communities in their necessarily private religious art in house-churches and foci of worship in communal underground cemeteries (catacombs). But with the edict of tolerance in 312 AD and the subsequent adoption of Christianity as the state religion, followed gradually by the banning of pagan worship and the closure of temples, radical changes affected the architecture and art of the LR Aegean.
Temple complexes dedicated to the Olympian gods and Oriental cults were systematically demolished or converted to Christian use, hence the survival of Classical temples such as the “Theseion” in the Athens Agora (Figures 16.1-2) and the Parthenon itself. All LR cities exhibit “spolia,” recycled architectural material from redundant shrines or pagan burial-monuments, placed in the new Christian churches, private houses, and notably in the great rebuilding of town defenses spurred on by the Barbarian invasions from the third century onwards. Nonetheless the late foundation dates of most Aegean churches and repeated imperial legislation indicate that paganism was mostly tolerated until the age of Justinian, so that temple destruction or conversion often occurs in practice in the fifth or even sixth and seventh centuries.
At the same time there was a dramatic need to create new, capacious places of worship now Christianity could be practiced in public and was attracting growing congregations. Its establishment as the state religion brought an unparalleled demand for large churches, as attendance was now associated with the institutional structure ofthe city (Color Plates 16.1a-b).
Greco-Roman temples housed cult statues and a treasury for dedications; formal worship was focused outside around altars and on temple steps. Christian worship however developed from Jewish traditions of communal worship inside a roofed space, requiring architects from Constantine the Great’s time onwards to elaborate an appropriate large-scale hall. Actually there already existed an ideal form in the public urban basilica, a rectangular building which could have galleries and naves, developed in the Roman world as a space for judicial proceedings and other public assemblies. Basilicas often possessed an apse for the presiding magistrate or official of the state to be seated in a dominating location. In the canonical new Christian temple, however, the axis of attention in the basilica moved from the entrance and apse facing each other in the center of each long side, to their placement at the opposing short ends. The altar and seats for the clergy and bishop (replacing the pagan judge and administrators), were located in the apse, often on a raised platform, with the congregation facing them in a clearly subordinate position (Runciman 1975).
Figure 16.2 The “Theseion” (Hephaisteion) converted to a church, Athens. J. M. Camp, The Archaeology of Athens. New Haven 2001, Figure 231.
The basilican hall would remain the characteristic church design for some 500 years (for a map of significant LR Greek examples see Sodini 1975).
The longitudinal organization of the basilica reflected the importance of movement in the physical performance of worship (Mathews 1998), with four processions: when the clergy made their entry, when Bible readings were given, when bread and wine were presented, and finally when communion was shared. Wall decorations accompanied these movements with dynamic narratives lining the nave, focusing attention on a stillness at the apse where the ceremonies culminated and whose art symbolized the communion act.
In Late Antique towns the clergy were given increasingly wider functions in the running of public affairs, so that ecclesiastical complexes formed one of the main foci for urban life. Since LR towns often witnessed radical shifts in zones of occupation, this new religious focus often lay in a different sector than the traditional Greco-Roman forum (Bintliff 1997). The importance of local martyrs also encouraged major churches at the edge of town, where their executions had occurred.
In the sixth century the emperor Justinian recovered large swathes of the former Western Empire, whilst encouraging monumental church-building as a symbol of Eastern Roman power. The most famous survivors of his program of new buildings or renovated structures are great churches at the port-town of Ravenna in Northeastern Italy and in Constantinople, but in Greece there are innumerable contemporary examples. Although these large churches were ubiquitous, only a minority survive as standing monuments, since many rural examples and those in smaller towns were not to outlast the abandonment or shrinkage of their settlements in the “Dark Ages” of the seventh to eighth centuries AD. Yet it is possible to rediscover even major churches which are invisible on the surface, as an example from the abandoned city of Tanagra (Boeotia) demonstrates. Here geophysical survey has revealed monuments such as two large Early Christian basilican churches, while subsequent targeted surface architecture collection (“ground-truthing”) has documented innumerable decorative elements from distinct parts of their plans (Bintliff and Slapsak 2007; for a parallel from Philippi see Provost and Boyd 2002).
A rarer MR-LR building type was a round, domed construction (rotunda), also of pagan origin. This had earlier served as a monumental tomb design or an imperial showpiece temple. The gigantic palatial complex of the emperor Galerius at Thessaloniki included a colossal circular domed temple-mausoleum, ca. 300 AD. The Rotunda was converted into a Christian monument, probably by the late fourth-century emperor Theodosius the Great, after which it was decorated with one of the earliest surviving large-scale Christian mosaic programs (Color Plate 16.2) (Nasrallah 2005). This domed and centralized plan, usually adopted in LR times for Christian mausolea (especially martyria) or baptisteries, was the seed of a far greater development within Byzantine church architecture. This is also anticipated in the greatest achievement of LR ecclesiastical construction at the “New Rome” of Constantinople, Justinian’s stupendous Aghia Sophia church (532—537 AD), the cathedral of the Eastern Empire (Mainstone 1988). Looking both backwards and into the future, it combines a giant basilica adorned with naves and galleries with a vast 30 meter-wide dome soaring 55 meters over its heart.
Late Antique churches were decorated primarily with striking, abstract surface ornament: intricate hollow-carved pillar-capitals, columns and screens of marble and other bright stones, veneers of colored stone on the walls (cleverly covering the underlying rubble, spolia, brick, and concrete construction). Often the upper walls and ceiling glittered with polychrome mosaics. Frescoes had been overtaken in popularity by mosaics, an art of display which suited the more dramatic forms of symbolic culture characteristic of Late Antiquity. Here Eastern Roman and later Byzantine artists became specialists in atmospheric light effects. Firstly, windows were few and often filled with alabaster sheets which diffused the light, then additional illumination from candles and lamps formed glowing pools which chained from one wall or icon to another. Mosaicists were also skilled in varying the angle of each cube to enhance the indistinct flickering of the flames illuminating them. The impression aimed for was to get the church and its decoration to shimmer with movement and the eye to be taken round the building and its images (Runciman 1975; cf. also Mathews 1998). The rising demand for church art stimulated regional mosaic and marble sculpture workshops to develop throughout the Aegean, although high-profile commissions such as the giant basilica at Corinth’s port of Lechaion (perhaps an imperial donation), used imported marble, ready-prepared pieces, and skilled workers alongside local artisans (Sodini 1970, 1977). Already in Constantine the Great’s first churches in the early fourth century, figurative Christian art could appear, raising even in this early period a debate on the risk of “idolatry” which would resurface more dramatically in the Byzantine era (Gregory 2006).
World History
