Byzantium: the chosen ones from a visceral civilisation
In Rimini there is a small square – the Piazza Ferrari. Here you can buy ice-creams, mooch under the linden trees, and peer down at 1,400-year-old Byzantine corpses. Excavations have just finished at the Surgeon’s House, discovered in 1989 when the piazza was being reland-scaped. Laid out on Gothic mosaics are the skeletons of a Christian community. The graves have been roughly gouged out of the tesserae, the bones are protected by crude roofing tiles. The Christians died during the turf wars of the 6th and 7th centuries – when the Goths and Byzantium both laid claim to Italian lands.
Rimini, just 40km (25 miles) along the coast from Ravenna (famous for its wonderful Byzantine decoration in the Church of San Vitale) reminds us that Byzantium – the subject of a major exhibition opening at the Royal Academy later this month – is not just about icons, gold mosaics and pretty churches – it represents a visceral civilisation, a world power whose tentacles stretched from Tripoli to St Petersburg, from North Africa to Trebizond. Byzantine control spanned a millennium. Many of our geopolitical boundaries, in the Balkans, the Middle East, Russia and Europe, were laid by Byzantine hands. Far from being an esoteric moment in art history, Byzantium is the story of us.
If you take a ferry to the Black Sea end of the Bosphorus, the last stop before Asia is a little port called Rumeli – “the land of the Romans”. Rumeli reminds us that Rome didn’t fall, it just moved 854 miles east. In AD330 the Roman Emperor Constantine – who believed that his hand was guided by God as he laid out its street plans – founded a new Christian city on the Golden Horn. Constantinople was to be the capital of the Christian east, the culmination of human civilisation on Earth.
Byzantine boundaries might wax and wane, but here was a community, God’s “chosen people”. Here we find the tussle between Eastern and Western Churches played out, a crucible of high (and low) culture, of modern administrative practice, and a ferocious champion of the genius of antiquity.
So why then is Byzantium not on every school syllabus? A civilisation that explains so much about the mixed marriage of East and West? One reason is that the idea of Byzantium is complicated: here were Romans who spoke no Latin, operating at a time when Muslims spoke mainly Greek. Here were Christians who delighted in the study of pagan texts. Even today its capital – now named Istanbul – is a mixed bag, Russian supertankers grind around the Sea of Marmara, the Turkish military fly low over sun-worshipping travellers, women in burkas shop alongside women in Chanel.
But both historically, and in terms of the history of its art, Byzantium’s complexity is our gain. The Eastern roots of Byzantium are exposed. We might think of Byzantine icons as a pure expression of Christian fervour – but compare them with golden images of Bronze Age fertility goddesses from the Hittite Empire: they are peas in a pod. The traffic of influence was two-way. Thanks to the restoration of icon veneration in AD843 (for years Byzantium, like Islam, barred religious images of the human form), the figurative genre of Western art was nourished.
In its day, Constantinople was famed as a living museum, a protector and generator of world-class artefacts, sculptures, paintings and buildings. Its treasure attracted pilgrims and pillagers in equal measure. We are lucky that the curators of the Royal Academy show have laboured to show us just some of what has survived – artworks that can transport us, and that were adored and lusted after by the medieval mind...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Rimini, just 40km (25 miles) along the coast from Ravenna (famous for its wonderful Byzantine decoration in the Church of San Vitale) reminds us that Byzantium – the subject of a major exhibition opening at the Royal Academy later this month – is not just about icons, gold mosaics and pretty churches – it represents a visceral civilisation, a world power whose tentacles stretched from Tripoli to St Petersburg, from North Africa to Trebizond. Byzantine control spanned a millennium. Many of our geopolitical boundaries, in the Balkans, the Middle East, Russia and Europe, were laid by Byzantine hands. Far from being an esoteric moment in art history, Byzantium is the story of us.
If you take a ferry to the Black Sea end of the Bosphorus, the last stop before Asia is a little port called Rumeli – “the land of the Romans”. Rumeli reminds us that Rome didn’t fall, it just moved 854 miles east. In AD330 the Roman Emperor Constantine – who believed that his hand was guided by God as he laid out its street plans – founded a new Christian city on the Golden Horn. Constantinople was to be the capital of the Christian east, the culmination of human civilisation on Earth.
Byzantine boundaries might wax and wane, but here was a community, God’s “chosen people”. Here we find the tussle between Eastern and Western Churches played out, a crucible of high (and low) culture, of modern administrative practice, and a ferocious champion of the genius of antiquity.
So why then is Byzantium not on every school syllabus? A civilisation that explains so much about the mixed marriage of East and West? One reason is that the idea of Byzantium is complicated: here were Romans who spoke no Latin, operating at a time when Muslims spoke mainly Greek. Here were Christians who delighted in the study of pagan texts. Even today its capital – now named Istanbul – is a mixed bag, Russian supertankers grind around the Sea of Marmara, the Turkish military fly low over sun-worshipping travellers, women in burkas shop alongside women in Chanel.
But both historically, and in terms of the history of its art, Byzantium’s complexity is our gain. The Eastern roots of Byzantium are exposed. We might think of Byzantine icons as a pure expression of Christian fervour – but compare them with golden images of Bronze Age fertility goddesses from the Hittite Empire: they are peas in a pod. The traffic of influence was two-way. Thanks to the restoration of icon veneration in AD843 (for years Byzantium, like Islam, barred religious images of the human form), the figurative genre of Western art was nourished.
In its day, Constantinople was famed as a living museum, a protector and generator of world-class artefacts, sculptures, paintings and buildings. Its treasure attracted pilgrims and pillagers in equal measure. We are lucky that the curators of the Royal Academy show have laboured to show us just some of what has survived – artworks that can transport us, and that were adored and lusted after by the medieval mind...