Icons

Images of Christian saints and divinities are central to Greek Orthodox symbolic culture, and were well established in the Byzantine world (the direct descendant of the LR Eastern Empire) by the ninth century AD. They form a material “portal” where supernatural power communicates with the world of mortals, and still today attract fervent belief in their healing and protective powers. Technically, experts restrict the term “icon” to sacred representations painted on wood, and these have the particular potential to be opened and shut with door-panels, conveyed from church to church or around a town and also borne into battle (Cormack 1985). But from Late Antiquity onwards such images were closely related to similar pictures in mosaic or paint affixed to church walls and ceilings (Color Plate 16.2). As these icons played a key role in the identity of what became Byzantine society in Greece, and indeed provide spiritual continuity with Modern Greek culture and the far wider Eastern Orthodox religious communities, we shall discuss the origins of this phenomenon.

There are pagan examples within the Roman Empire of the private ownership of small images of divinities painted on wood. They already diverge from the remote Classicizing statues found in public temples through their frontal stare at the worshipper, commanding attention and signifying a personal eye-contact with the supernatural protector. Painted haloes or fires may enhance the imagined power of the sacred beings (Elsner 1998), whilst lids protect the images and shield their fearful gaze from casual view. Possibly these little-known household icons were set within a framework of candles, incense-burners, and cushions for the worshipper. Christians appear to have borrowed these customs for early representations of saints, and indeed the world of the home remained the special sanctuary for icons whereas their popularity in churches fluctuated. This created an opportunity, seized by women, to reset the balance of public worship, where they were marginalized physically and as participants.

In creating images of their new divinities Christian artists had little or nothing to rely on for authenticity and increasingly adopted appropriate iconography from pagan sacred art to create powerful effects. Thus in our earliest images Jesus is a young beardless man with short curly hair, but gradually another type grew in popularity to become today’s standard representation, a bearded man with long, parted hair. The fifth-century bishop Gennadius was in no doubt about the source of the second form when he healed the withered hand of “a painter who dared to paint the Savior in the likeness of Zeus” (as recorded by the sixth-century Church historian Theodore the Reader).

Icons increasingly invaded the space of the community church. In the sixth century, figurative images were especially common in the focal apse and on the low screen or templon which, placed between apse and nave, separated clergy from congregation. Moreover as this display area grew in symbolic prominence, more prestigious materials were employed there, marble and mosaic. In so doing, the Church emphasized its power over the people through spatial barriers marked by potent images. By the seventh century prominent icons were borne in public to counter Barbarian attacks on Eastern Roman towns, and were attributed miraculous healing-powers.

One little-preserved locale for Christian art was the decorated tombstone or family vault. Thessaloniki possesses one of the finest collection of such wall-paintings in the Aegean region (Kourkoutidou-Nicolaidou 1997) from the third to sixth centuries. They develop from traditional pagan themes, imitations of luxury homes with marble veneer walls and scenes of the “good life” expected hereafter, to Christian spiritual symbols such as the lamb, deer, and lion, or biblical characters taken from the Old and New Testament.

Even rarer are the splendid luxury silver and gold chalices and plates used in church liturgy, similar to those present at the dining-tables of the non-ecclesiastical elite. Greek representatives were mostly lost in the wars and destructions which the Aegean suffered in Medieval and post-Medieval times, but similar objects from the Late Roman world appear in rare buried hoards of treasure, in cathedral treasuries in Western Europe, or as gifts, trade items or simple plunder in the graves of Barbarian chiefs (such as the royal grave at early seventh-century Sutton Hoo in England, Lebecq 1997).