Most of our direct knowledge about the embellishment of buildings comes from monumental church decoration, although excavated houses at Ephesos and other sites witness to interior decoration in domestic settings. The Palatine Anthology mentions pictures of charioteers in the Hippodrome (Mango 1972: 49-50) and the sixth-century verses of Agathias also refer to portraits of magistrates, a professor, and a prostitute in secular settings (Mango 1972: 119). In churches, pride of place in the early period was given to the sanctuary decoration, but by the late Byzantine period both walls and vaults contained virtually encyclopaedic visual compendia of church history and saints. The eighth-century commentary on the liturgy by Germanos, Patriarch of Constantinople from 715 to 733, the Historia Ecclesiastica, reveals that particular parts of the church were seen in terms of evocative moments in the life of Christ, and so the apse was regarded as the cave of the nativity and the altar table as the place where Christ was laid in the tomb (Meyendorff 1984). This topographical symbolism was the conceptual basis for choosing to represent the Virgin and child in the apse and Christ in the dome, which was understood as a symbol of heaven (Gerstel 1999). Another principle was to link the choice of decoration with the function of a particular church space, and this is to be seen in the choice of the Baptism and the Last Judgement for the narthex, where baptism and commemoration of the dead took place. But such pictorial connections acted as loose principles rather than as a fully worked out or imposed ‘ideal’ image system (Demus 1948: 14ff.). By the eighteenth century, Dionysius of Fourna (Hetherington 1974: 84-7, translating the Greek text of
Papadopoulos-Kerameus 1909) had, however, formalized Orthodox practice and was prepared to prescribe the decoration of the ‘normal’ church architecture.
Mosaic was more expensive than wall-painting, because it involved all the same processes of organization and preparation, but in addition required the manufacture and setting of hundreds of stone and glass tesserae in the plaster. For this reason it has been often assumed that mosaic was an imperial monopoly. This was certainly not the case in the pre-iconoclastic period, where for example several churches on Cyprus had mosaic decorations which have no patronal connection with the emperor, such as the apses of the churches at Kiti and Livadhia and at the Panagia Kanakaria (James 2006:32). Even S. Vitale at Ravenna despite the inclusion of two imperial portrait panels was sponsored by the local Julius Argentarius rather than Justinian (Mango 1972:104-5). Nor is Justinian’s patronage mentioned on the mosaic apse inscriptions at St Catherine’s at Sinai, though his name appears on the wooden roof beams (datable between 548 and 565). However, after iconoclasm a number of mosaic decorations are more specifically connected with emperors— such as the mosaics of Hagia Sophia, and those of the Nea Moni on Chios which are connected with Constantine Monomachos (Mouriki 1985:21-9). The last major mosaics set up in Constantinople, those of the Kariye Camii (the Chora Monastery), were financed by the Grand Logothete Theodore Metochites and not the emperor himself. Wall-painting is much more common than mosaic, and the walls and vaults of every Byzantine church would have received some sort of embellishment, even if only a decoration of crosses and ornament, as in the case of Justinian’s Hagia Sophia (in mosaic) and of several of the rock-cut churches of Cappadocia.
World History
