Byzantine art for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

In 330 CE the emperor Constantine dedicated a new capital on the site of the Greek city of Byzantium. Constantinople, now Istanbul, stayed the capital of the eastern Roman Empire until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its people called themselves Romans; “Byzantine” is a modern word. For more than a thousand years they made some of the most luminous art in the world, an art of gold, light and presence.

Three layers

Historical What the works and texts of the time show. Later tradition What later centuries, and the Orthodox tradition, made of them. Modern How people use icons and their symbols today.

A new way of seeing

Historical Around the year 300, Roman art began to change. Figures became frontal and symmetrical, eyes grew large, bodies grew flatter and space mattered less. Older historians saw decline. In 1901 the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl argued instead that it was a new artistic will, aiming at something other than the illusion of real space. Most scholars today agree. These images face you, because they were meant to be met, not just observed.

Ravenna and Hagia Sophia

Historical In the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, consecrated in 547, the emperor Justinian and the empress Theodora stand in mosaic with their courts, carrying gifts for the altar. Their feet barely touch the ground, and gold surrounds them. Justinian’s great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, built in just five years from 532 to 537, was crowned by a dome that seemed to float on a ring of windows.

Mosaic is made from small cubes of glass and stone called tesserae. In Byzantine mosaics many gold tesserae were set at slight angles, so the wall flickers as you move and as candlelight shifts. Photographs flatten this effect. If you can ever stand in one of these churches at dusk, do.

Painted Copy of Deesis Mosaic, late 1930s (original dated 1261 to 1300). The Metropolitan Museum of Art (41.137). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

This is a painted copy on canvas, made in the late 1930s, of the Deesis mosaic in Hagia Sophia, from the late thirteenth century. Christ is flanked by Mary and John the Baptist, who turn toward him to plead for humanity. The faces are soft and sorrowful, a sign of how much warmth late Byzantine art could hold.

Icons and the war over images

Historical An icon is a holy image, usually painted on a wooden panel, of Christ, Mary or a saint. In the eighth century a bitter conflict broke out over whether such images were allowed. During Iconoclasm, roughly 726 or 730 to 787 and again from 815 to 843, many images were destroyed. Their defenders, most famously the theologian John of Damascus, argued that because God had become human in Christ, Christ could be shown, and that honor given to an image passes to the person it represents. Veneration was allowed; worship belonged to God alone. In 843 icons were restored for good, a day still celebrated in the Orthodox Church as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

Because of Iconoclasm, few religious images survive from before the ninth century. The icons of Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Sinai, out of reach of imperial policy, are among the most precious survivors.

The esoteric angle

Historical Byzantine people also used protective objects: amulets, inscribed rings and images of saints worn against illness and harm. Church authorities sometimes criticized these practices, which tells us how common they were.

Later tradition The gold ground, the frontal gaze and the idea of the image as a window to the holy deeply influenced later religious art, and also modern artists. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky later remembered the icons he saw in peasant houses on a journey to the Vologda region in 1889, and the gold of Byzantine mosaics, which Gustav Klimt saw in Ravenna in 1903, shines through Klimt’s golden paintings. See Art Nouveau.

Modern Many people today, of many faiths and none, keep an icon or icon-style image on an altar. If you do, I recommend learning what it shows and how it is used in Orthodox life, so you can treat it with respect.

Try it yourself

Find a good image of the Justinian or Theodora mosaic at San Vitale. Look first at the background, then at the faces and the feet. Then write how the scene might look at dawn, at noon and by candlelight, remembering that the gold tesserae were set at angles to catch moving light.

Before and after

Before this: Ancient Roman art.

After this: Early medieval art.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.