A face beneath the overpaint
In Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai hangs a wooden panel not much bigger than an open atlas. Christ looks straight at the viewer, his right hand raised in blessing, a jewelled book in his left. Look closely and the two halves of his face are not the same: one seems gentle, the other stern. The icon is painted in encaustic, with hot, pigmented wax, a technique inherited from antiquity. For centuries it lay beneath later overpainting, and for a long time it was taken for a thirteenth-century work. Only when it was uncovered did it emerge that it dates from the sixth century. It is now considered the oldest surviving image of Christ as Pantocrator, ruler of all.
It survived because of its remote location. In the heart of the empire almost all such images were destroyed in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Romans we call Byzantines
The people who made this art would never have called themselves Byzantines. They thought of themselves as Romans; their state was the Roman Empire, which lived on in the East after the West collapsed in the fifth century. The label “Byzantine”, after Byzantion, the old name of Constantinople, was popularised only by the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf in a collection of sources published in 1557.
Emperor Constantine had refounded the city as his capital in 330. From here ruled emperors who were also protectors of the Church, and art served both: it was meant to make God visible and to present the emperor as his deputy on earth.
Gold, light and domes
Under Justinian I early Byzantine art reached its first peak. After a riot destroyed the old church in 532, he had Hagia Sophia rebuilt in just five years. The architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both also mathematicians, raised over the space a dome more than 30 metres across that seems to float above a ring of windows. It collapsed after earthquakes in 558 and was rebuilt higher. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453 the church became a mosque, in 1934 a museum, and since 2020 it has been a mosque again.
Ravenna, then a Byzantine stronghold in Italy, shows best what the art of this period looked like. In the church of San Vitale, consecrated in 547, two mosaics face each other in the apse: Justinian with courtiers, clergy and soldiers, and his wife Theodora with her ladies, both carrying offerings. The figures stand frontal and almost weightless against gold. Space and shadow hardly matter; rank does. A mosaic is made of thousands of small stone and glass cubes called tesserae. The gold ones hold real gold leaf between two layers of glass and are set at a slight angle so that they catch the candlelight.
The war over images
May God be depicted? Around 730 Emperor Leo III banned the veneration of religious images. The resulting Iconoclasm, with one interruption, lasted more than a century. Icons were destroyed, mosaics whitewashed or replaced by plain crosses. Only in 843 did Empress Theodora, not to be confused with Justinian’s wife, restore the veneration of images for good. The Eastern Church still celebrates the day as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”.
The conflict changed art fundamentally. The icon became a fixed image with a theological claim: not just any portrait, but an archetype that the painter passes on as faithfully as possible. That is why icons resemble one another across the centuries, and why their painters almost always remained anonymous.
An empire that radiated
Byzantine silks, ivories and goldsmiths’ work were coveted gifts throughout the Middle Ages. When Theophanu, niece of a Byzantine emperor, married the future Emperor Otto II in 972, works of art and models from Constantinople came with her to the German court. Venice employed Byzantine mosaicists at San Marco, and in Sicily they decorated the churches of the Norman kings. Icons reached Russia with Christianity; the Virgin of Vladimir, painted in Constantinople around 1130, became a national treasure there.
Thirteenth-century Italian painting also followed the “Greek manner”, as it was called. Cimabue and Duccio painted Madonnas on gold grounds after Byzantine models before Giotto broke away from them.
The last flowering
In 1204 crusaders captured and sacked Constantinople; the famous bronze horses of San Marco in Venice are part of the loot. The empire only partly recovered, yet its art enjoyed one late flowering. Between about 1310 and 1321 the statesman and scholar Theodore Metochites had the Chora Church in Constantinople decorated. Its mosaics and frescoes tell the lives of Mary and Christ with a liveliness and movement that Byzantine art is often denied. The Anastasis fresco shows Christ pulling Adam and Eve from their tombs with a firm grip. Since May 2024 the building has been open again as the Kariye Mosque.
On 29 May 1453 the Ottomans took Constantinople. The empire ended; its art did not. On Crete, then under Venetian rule, workshops went on painting icons for churches in East and West. It was here that a young painter called Domenikos Theotokopoulos learned his craft before moving on to Venice, Rome and Toledo, where he became famous as El Greco.
Why it still matters
In every Orthodox church, from Athens to Moscow, the Byzantine image world lives on. Modern artists found their way to it too: Gustav Klimt saw the mosaics of Ravenna in 1903, and their gold glows in his paintings of the following years. Henri Matisse admired Russian icons, and in 1915 Kazimir Malevich hung his Black Square high in the corner of the room, where the icon hangs in Russian homes.
Further reading
- Robin Cormack: Byzantine Art (Oxford History of Art, 2nd ed. 2018).
- Hans Belting: Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art (1994).