Cormack (1985) has argued that Byzantine civilization was dominated by the Church. It deployed art, for whom it was the chief patron, as a means to reproduce a particular mentality which aimed to discipline everyday public and private life. The Byzantine world was portrayed as aspiring as closely as possible to Heaven on Earth, with the emperor and priesthood God’s representatives in this grand design. Art could thus complement military action, strengthening the Byzantines’ sense of destiny when the Eastern Roman Empire was threatened with total destruction during the Dark Age centuries.
Cormack uses the example of Saint Demetrius in his great pilgrim church at the city of Thessaloniki. Martyred in the fourth century AD, his symbolic role as divine patron of the town was soon a focal point of resistance to enemy attacks. In the late sixth century large Avar and Slav forces besieged the town but the threat was beaten off, not least by the saint himself, whose supernatural embodiment took to the walls to repel the invaders. A celebratory depiction of ca. 620 (Figure 18.1) shows the saint with one arm round the city’s religious head, the bishop, the other around the regional military and civil governor, the eparch. Although the saint’s body had not been preserved, a special shrine (ciborium) had been erected. This was a highly-decorated locale with dedications and artworks donated by the poorer faithful and local elites, and it became a focus for bringing the sick for miraculous healing, for prayers of personal intervention, and even for timely manifestations of the saint to assist the city in times of need. These might include, alongside sieges, food shortages and civil unrest. The Church encouraged this local “hero cult” to control and inspire the town’s population.
We can also observe that wealthy aristocrats had by now diverted the wealth they had in pagan times spent for public entertainments and civic monuments, into the construction and decoration of churches and monasteries. Here they were often portrayed as pious donors, alongside the saints and even more powerful Christian figures such as Mary or Jesus.
The intimate relationship between Byzantine life and Orthodoxy meant however that crisis in society could be refracted into religion. Since Christian symbolic culture and its associated rituals were the central medium for reproducing Orthodoxy, it becomes less surprising to find that the “Dark Ages” of the seventh to mid-ninth centuries also provoked an Empirewide assault on icons known as Iconoclasm (“the smashing of images”). From the early seventh century onwards, Islamic armies had swept out of Arabia and in astonishingly rapid conquests had driven Byzantine
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Bintliff. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Figure 18.1 Saint Demetrius mosaic, Thessaloniki (ca. 620 AD).
E. Kourkoutidou-Nicolaidou and A. Tourta, Wandering in Byzantine Thessaloniki. Athens 1997, Figure 191. Photo © Kapon Editions.
Power from the Levant and North Africa. They then raided and threatened the surviving rump Eastern Roman territory for the succeeding two centuries. At the same time the Church grew immensely rich and politically influential, encouraging the populace to orient their mentalities to the magical power of icons and the mystical power of the clergy, rather than to the army and the emperor. An influential sector of the Byzantine secular elite, as well as more fundamentalist Eastern church leaders, began to believe that the defeat of the Empire and its threatened imminent demise was due to God’s displeasure at the perversion of his commands. Was it not forbidden by Moses’ Commandments to create graven images to worship? The cult of icons encouraged embracing and kissing of images, the belief that many were of supernatural rather than human manufacture, and widely-accepted tales that they could weep or bleed, and that their subjects could step out of the icon to work wonders. Was it not Islam which was more in God’s favor, with its stricter adherence to the nonportrayal of human or divine forms in its religious art, and hence the bringer of justified chastisement on Byzantine idolatry?
Between 726 and 780 and again from 813 to 843 AD, the imperial power and a body of favorable church leaders pursued a policy of Iconoclasm throughout the Empire: figurative church images were destroyed or painted over, and replaced by simple crosses and similar aniconic symbols. Contemporary historical sources may exaggerate the scale of destruction (Haldon 2000) and in Greece it may have been weakly implemented (Bouras 2006), but nonetheless this was an attempt to reorient deeply-rooted ways of thought in Byzantium public life. Icons had become a significant personal focus in the home, where women played a role in private worship denied them in public religious affairs, and it seems that iconoclasm was resisted in many domestic circles, not least because icon-worship offered women personal fulfillment, nor was this sphere a focus of official persecution. Significantly, it was indeed females of the imperial family who were responsible for the revival of icons which ended both periods of Iconoclasm.
We must always recall, however, that alongside the well-preserved religious art surviving today in churches, museums, libraries, and private collections, there was also a secular art, of hunting, battle, circus, and erotic scenes, almost all destroyed, just occasionally intruding into Christian contexts (Effenberger 2001, Maguire 2005).
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