Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca 680–850): The Sources

An Annotated Survey

Leslie Brubaker, John Haldon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351953658
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Iconoclasm, the debate about the legitimacy of religious art that began in Byzantium around 730 and continued for nearly 120 years, has long held a firm grip on the historical imagination. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era is the first book in English to survey the original sources crucial for a modern understanding of this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history. It is also the first book in any language to cover both the written and the visual evidence from this period, a combination of particular importance to the iconoclasm debate. The authors, an art historian and a historian who both specialise in the period, have worked together to provide a comprehensive overview of the visual and the written materials that together help clarify the complex issues of iconoclasm in Byzantium.

Part I
Material Culture

Chapter 1
The Architecture of Iconoclasm

Buildings

The age of iconoclasm was not conducive to the documentation of building activity.¹ The period nevertheless accounts for dramatic and permanent changes in Byzantine religious architecture in both form and scale, and the transformations of the period remain to be fully explicated. The lack of secure criteria for dating the surviving buildings has long plagued Byzantine scholarship. An earlier generation of scholars familiar with the architectural programme of Basil I, recounted in the vita Basilii, had viewed his reign as a formative period and consequently dated a variety of 'transitional' churches in Constantinople to the ninth century.² None of the buildings mentioned in the vita survives, however; nor do any other of the great monuments of ninth-century Constantinople.³ The palaces of Theophilos have similarly vanished without a trace, and only paltry foundations remain for the well-documented monasteries on the Princes' Islands.⁴

Architectural history relies on the study of buildings, of course, but it has not been entirely clear which surviving buildings belong in the period in question. A comparison of Chapter 13 ('The Cross-Domed Church') in the 1965 edition of Richard Krautheimer's Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture with the same in the revised 1986 edition gives some indication of the changes that have occurred in recent scholarship. Following the typological model of earlier scholars, Krautheimer believed that the cross-domed church formed the transitional link between the Early Christian and the Middle Byzantine church building, yet between the printing of the first and third editions of his handbook, many of his key monuments had been convincingly redated. The Gül Camii (Hagia Theodosia?) and the Kalenderhane Camii (Theotokos Kyriotissa) in Istanbul belong to the twelfth century.⁵ Two additional monuments often included in this discussion should now be placed earlier. A seventh-century date for Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki is supported both by epigraphic and by dendrochronological evidence, although this is still disputed.⁶ Most scholars now date the Koimesis church at Nicaea to ca 700 – that is, shortly before the beginning of iconoclasm, although the transformation of its apse decoration during and after the iconoclast period remains central to any discussion of the visual arts.

Lacking documentary evidence for most building campaigns, scholars have turned to other kinds of evidence for the dating of buildings. Most common, and most problematic, has been the reliance on the typological analysis of building forms (to which we shall return shortly) and on the iconographic analysis of monumental painting. The difficulties of the latter are amply demonstrated by the burgeoning bibliography on the painted rock-cut churches of Cappadocia. Numerous churches are painted with geometric patterning and display prominently images of the cross. Following the pioneering scholarship of G. de Jerphanion, Nicole Thierry remains the major proponent for dating Cappadocian churches with aniconic decoration to the period of iconoclasm.⁷ However, key monuments, such as Hosios Vasilios in Elevra, the hermitage of Niketas the Stylite in Güllü Dere, and Hagios Stephanos near Cemil, have primarily aniconic decoration, into which a few figures have been inserted. Scholars have justifiably raised questions concerning the iconoclast dating of these buildings.⁸ Should they be interpreted as betraying an iconoclasm not fully absorbed, or lingering iconoclast sentiments dating from after the so-called Triumph of Orthodoxy? Do they, in fact, have anything to do with iconoclasm as legislated from Constantinople?

Considering the well-documented Arab incursions into the region, it would appear that Cappadocia remained destabilized for much of the period in question, and that artistic production would have been at best minimal. Still, the theme of continuité ou rupture continues to dominate Cappadocian studies. Moreover, the impact of Constantinopolitan iconoclasm in the provincial setting of Cappadocia may have been limited. At Kurt Dere, for example, crudely decorated tombs and chapels can be dated to this period on epigraphic grounds, but here we find figural and aniconic decoration side by side, perhaps by the same painters.⁹

The belief that non-figural church decoration must best be placed into the period of iconoclasm has affected the scholarship in other regions of the Byzantine world as well. Various 'iconoclast' monuments have been identified in the Pontos¹⁰ and elsewhere in Anatolia;¹¹ all have been, or should be, dated with caution. On Naxos, thirteen monuments have aniconic decoration, about which much has been written, but not all may be from the period of iconoclasm, and some of the 'iconoclast' paintings remained exposed centuries after the Triumph of Orthodoxy.¹² A church excavated on the Via Egnatia in Thessaloniki had similar decorations.¹³ Other 'iconoclast' monuments have been identified in Cherson, Georgia, Crete, Greece, and Turkish Thrace.¹⁴ In all, the dating is insecure, and in any event, the architectural forms of these buildings tend to be simple and conservative, less interesting and considerably less problematic than their painting.

The contribution of dendrochronology has been more fruitful if less fully absorbed into scholarship. Wooden beams were part of the standard system of structural reinforcement in masonry buildings, and when they survive, their pattern of tree-rings can be matched against other wood samples from the same region.¹⁵ Following years of data collecting, Peter Kuniholm and his staff at Cornell University have finally been able to connect a long series of tree-ring data, extending their master chronology back to the year 362.¹⁶ As the dendrochronologists insist, the tree-ring data must be used with caution, for their studies provide a date for the wood, not for the building. When bark is preserved on the wood sample, and when several samples from the same monument have matching ring patterns, however, they can provide a terminus post quem within a few years of construction. This is borne out by the close correlation between the tree-ring dates and documented construction activity, as for example in the two sixth-century phases of building at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.¹⁷ Dendrochronology also bears out the seventh-century dating for Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki proposed by Theocharidou.¹⁸

For the poorly documented period of iconoclasm, this information is invaluable. For example, the reconstruction of Hagia Eirene in Constantinople following the earthquake of 740 can now be securely positioned in 753 or shortly thereafter – a date that accords well with the political career of its patron Constantine V. Similarly, the church of Hagia Sophia in Vize may be dated sometime after 833, supporting Mango's interpretation.¹⁹ The Fatih Camii at Trilye, often said to be the oldest surviving cross-in-square church, yields a tree-ring date of 799, placing the building comfortably into the early ninth century. Several ninth-century modifications to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople are indicated by the tree-ring data. A beam in the Baptistery suggests an otherwise unattested remodeling after 814. The room over the southwest vestibule dates sometime after 854, and this agrees with the date assigned to the mosaics by Cormack and Hawkins.²⁰ An intermediate room in the northeast buttress dates after 892.

Returning to the problems of formal analysis, the standard approach to Byzantine architecture has been typological, with buildings categorized according to ground plan and spatial definition. Although typology provides a simple system of description, as Mango notes, 'Buildings are labeled and pigeon-holed like biological specimens according to formal criteria: where a resemblance is found a connection is assumed even across a wide gulf in time and space.'²¹ When what is simple becomes simplistic, a system of categorization can easily misdirect scholarly inquiry. Moreover, a typological approach fails to provide an adequate explanation of the relationship between different types of buildings.

Traditional scholarship presents four major steps of development that mark the transition between the Early Christian basilica and the domed Middle Byzantine church. The domed basilica makes its appearance in the sixth, and possibly already in the late fifth century, marking an important change from wooden-roofed to vaulted forms, best witness...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Frequently Cited Works
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• PART I MATERIAL CULTURE
• PART II THE WRITTEN SOURCES
• Index