by Nigel Spivey
Paul, whom Christians know as St Paul, and who, more than anyone else, may be considered responsible for organizing Christianity as a creed, escaped the raging mob at Ephesus. One day, though, he would be executed as a martyr (witness) of Jesus Christ. As a young man, he had been present when the proto-martyr Stephen paid for a declaration of Christian allegiance by being stoned to death outside the walls of Jerusalem. Since his own conversion to the cause, Paul was no stranger to the risk of a violent end. ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,’ went the slogan of Christian campaigners in the later Roman empire. Soon enough such acts of martyrdom were not only chronicled as scripts of extravagant zeal, but also entered into a topography of votive pilgrimage.The relics of Stephen amounted to dust, but they drew a multitude. Paul at Ephesus would appear to have issued a Christian prohibition upon images of divine intent.Yet the Christian cult of martyrs led directly to the Christian cult of relics; and the Christian cult of relics soon enough generated a class of images for which Greek terminology again supplied the word: eikon, meaning literally ‘likeness’.
Sainthood – the process of Christian heroization, whereby a particular witness was acclaimed as holy and allocated an anniversary or feast day for special remembrance and celebration – gave rise to numerous sites of worship, even when links between saint, relics and place were tenuous.The story of a high-born martyr called Catherine, for instance, was located in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where Catherine courted her end (at the time of the emperor Maxentius, in the early fourth century) by protesting against the Roman custom of worshipping statues. It was in Alexandria that Catherine was tried, tortured (on a spiked wheel) and eventually killed. But her relics made their way down to the Sinai peninsula, to a Christian monastery founded on the site where Moses was said to have experienced his first divine appearance. (God called out to Moses from a burning bush, as told in Exodus 3–4; the bush was not consumed, and indeed still flourishes inside the monastery.) During the sixth century, the monastery was solidly fortified in its location below Mount Sinai; and despite the respective reputations of Moses and Catherine, both of whom were opposed to divine iconography, it was also adorned with images. In the domed apse of the monastic church, a mosaic was inlaid, depicting a marvellous event: the occasion when Christ, not long before his final surrender to ‘the power of men’, was transfigured upon a mountain-top in the presence of some of his disciples. Gospel writers tell of how the face of Christ ‘shone like the sun’, and his clothes turned brilliant as light, as two prophets, Moses and Elijah, appeared to converse with him.Then a voice boomed from the heavens, affirming, ‘This is my Son, my beloved.’The mosaic uses gold to transmit the sudden suffusion of brightness. The three disciples (named in Greek as John, Peter and James) fall dazzled to the ground; the two prophets make gestures as if to say, ‘We told you so’; and Christ provides the almond-shaped hub from which luminous shafts radiate.
It is a brave work of art.The New Testament scriptures of Christ’s birth, ministry and death were centrally concerned with the account of Jesus as a divinity in mortal form.The Transfiguration is one of the miracle signs included by those scriptures as moments when mortal limits were flaunted. Matthew’s gospel refers to what happened as a vision, but when an event was lodged into the tenets of faith as uniquely extraordinary and miraculous, how should any artist presume to render its likeness?
The commission to represent a miracle would fall often enough to artists in later Christendom. Much of the art of medieval Europe derives from precisely that sort of commission.The early Christians, however, were uncertain as to how their faith should find its graphic emphasis – not to mention the problem of their doubt over the validity of divine images at all.The primary call of Paul’s ministry was for Christians to celebrate Jesus Christ not so much as he had lived and taught, but as he had been crucified. Crucifixion was known as the most abysmal form of punishment in the Roman Empire: it was a drawn-out extreme of agony and humiliation chiefly reserved for those of servile estate. Some Christian believers – the so-called Gnostics, or ‘knowing ones’ – adopted the attitude that Christ had only seemed to undergo this degrading death. But Gnostics or not, the early Christians were evidently reluctant to imagine what Paul’s theology demanded – a wonderful ‘lord’ who had died like a criminal slave; a ‘living corpse’ stretched out upon the timbers of a cross.They preferred to think of Christ as a teacher with a scroll, or as the ‘Good Shepherd’, who would lead none of his flock astray (Fig. 106).
Five centuries, or thereabouts, would pass before this apparent taboo was overcome. And the first representations of Christ on the cross were done with a palpable effort to avoid the horror and pathos of the scene. On one early attempt, carved into a church door-panel in Rome, the artist still seems bashful about showing the arbor infelix (unhappy tree) that was the Roman euphemism for the cross as a mode of death (Fig. 107). Christ is there, and the two thieves who were condemned to die alongside him; but a viewer could be forgiven for thinking that all three are holding out their arms in benign appeal, not racked across beams.
For several hundred years on, ‘Christ in Glory’ was a concept sustained despite the theological importance of Christ’s desolate death on a cross. Prior to about the end of the first millennium marked by Christians as Anno Domini (AD) – ‘by the year of [the birth of] the Lord’ – Christ was depicted as shiningly triumphant, even when crucified. But the Christian clergy were periodically beset by worries over whether such depictions were valid at all. It was the Roman emperor Constantine who, in the early fourth century, officially accepted Christianity as an institutional faith, and who established a new and predominantly Christian capital city at the edge of Asia Minor, on the site of Byzantium. Named after its founder, Constantinople, was the centre of an empire known as Byzantine, and is now the Turkish city of Istanbul. But from the outset, Christian bishops attached to Constantine’s court fretted about the quantity of old Classical or pagan statuary that the emperor insisted on importing to adorn his city, a ‘second Rome’.These antique images of Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite – or Jupiter, Minerva and Venus, as they were to the Romans – what were they supposed to mean when displayed in a notionally Christian society?
In fact, the deities of the Greeks and Romans were not yet formally abandoned. It was a subsequent Byzantine emperor,Theodosius, who terminated cult practice at such long-honoured Classical sanctuaries as Olympia and Delphi (in the last decade of the fourth century), and we can presume that vast numbers of Classical votive and divine images were burnt, melted down, dismantled or pulverized around this time. But local and regional traditions of sanctity were not easily obliterated. In Asia Minor, for example, the custom of staging a religious festival for some solar divinity at around the time of the winter solstice was so entrenched that Christian clerics were obliged to fix the calendar date of Christ’s nativity in that period, and allow due celebration of ‘the Sun of Righteousness’. And in terms of church location, it happened that many Christian basilicas were built within or upon old Classical temples – therefore with a longitudinal axis pointing east, towards the rising sun (which is what ‘orientation’ literally implies). Naturally the question arose: should worship in a Christian context proceed as it had done in a Classical temple – with the conspicuous mediation of images?
The debate over this issue was complicated by much doctrinal wrangling about Christ’s paradoxical designation as a theanthropos (god-man): those who would confine him to ‘one nature’ were eventually reckoned to be heretics.A heretic is, in its original sense, ‘one who chooses’ – chooses wrongly, in the eyes of ecclesiastical authority – and perhaps it was the proliferation of errors or heresies in early Christianity that ultimately favoured the use of images in the Christian Church. Images could deliver the messages of orthodoxy, or ‘unswerving belief’, more directly than the bulky transcripts of scholarly dispute.Where fuzziness prevailed, images could bring instant resolution.
That didactic j
ustification of church art was invoked during an episode in Byzantine history known as the Iconoclastic Controversy. In the year 726 the emperor Leo III outlawed all images of Christ and his mother, the Virgin Mary.This purge amounted to iconoclasm (literally ‘breaking images’).Those who protested could consider themselves iconophiles, or ‘image lovers’.The iconophiles were not, however, enamoured of image-making merely for the sake of doctrinal clarity.They also argued that the worship of God was distinct from the ‘relative honour’ paid to divine images. An image might be carried in processions and serve as the focus of burning incense or lighted candles, but it remained in itself merely an aid to contemplation; like a ladder enabling the devout spirit to ascend to levels of higher power. In any case, as the iconophiles argued, Christians conceived of a creative God, a God whose handiwork was manifest all around. He must surely approve of art for divine purpose, so the embellishment of places set aside for the worship of this God was righteous and appropriate.
106 (top) Wall painting showing Christ as the Good Shepherd, Rome, 3rd century.
107 (above) Door-panel from the church of Santa Sabina, Rome, 5th century.
The matter was settled in the year 843.Then it was the empress Theodora who prescribed the following lines to be chanted in an annual feast of orthodoxy.
‘We paint icons, we venerate them with our mouths, our hearts, and our will – images of Christ and the saints.The honour and veneration directed toward the likeness guide us to its original.That is the doctrine of the Fathers inspired by God.’
And this doctrine was duly built into the structure of the Eastern and professedly orthodox branch of the Christian Church – strong in Constantinople until 1453 (when Muslim Turks overran the city and effectively ended the Byzantine Empire), penetrating to parts of the Middle East, and extending through Greece and the Balkans into Russia. Orthodox churches were fitted with a screen to separate the altar from the nave: whether this screen was a low barrier or a high wall, it served as a hanging space for icons, and was known as an iconostasis (icon stop). In its developed state, the iconostasis would be a wooden partition with three doors, and display a preordained layout of devotional images. Over the middle doorway there should be an icon of Christ enthroned, perhaps in the office of pantocrator (ruler of all); this central Christ should then be flanked by icons of saints who offer prayers of intercession.
There were other subjects of icon-painting, notably the Virgin Mary, or Theotokos (the one who gave birth to God); and there were other opportunities for positioning icons within an Orthodox church, such as free-standing ‘veneration poles’. In general, the premises of worship were available for beautification ‘like a bride’, so it can be a heady experience to step into an Orthodox church layered with such adornment over centuries. And for the makers of icons, an overtly embellished effect is in keeping with their intentions. It must seem as if form, colour and execution all came irresistibly, compelled by a surge of divine impetus. Indeed, certain icons – for instance, one at Edessa, in northern Syria – were notorious for being ‘not made by human hands’, especially if they represented the visage of Christ. Because of lingering suspicions about pagan idolatry, artists employed by the Orthodox clergy remained nervous of doing anything in three dimensions. But they were not, evidently, discouraged from adopting ostentatious strategies for stressing the spiritual purpose of their work.These included some clear departures from naturalistic models. In Orthodox icon-painting, heads often appear elongated in relation to bodies, eyes magnified within heads, and fingers drawn to tapering finesse – all distortions signifying holiness. Colours and metallic gleam were also emblematic. Icons were (and still are) painted on wooden panels primed with chalk, in tempera – pigments mixed with egg yolk.The bright effect of this paintwork is heightened by an ‘assist’ or hatching of gold, the lustre of which reveals divine energy and radiance, while its value testifies to the devout motivation of the icon-maker.
When art declaredly flows from religious devotion it may be perverse to celebrate particular painters and periods of painting. But it is generally agreed that icon-painting was never so delicately practised as in Russia during the early fifteenth century. Particular centres of excellence included Moscow, Pskov and Novgorod, and various artists have been identified. Principal among them is Andrei Rublyov. Little is known about him, but we do know that he thought of himself as writing rather than painting an icon, therefore, in his way, contributing to scripture. And when we gaze at one of his ‘writings’, a typically centre-of-screen Christ in Glory (Fig. 108), we understand how it is that gold, for the icon-painter, is not simply a shiny colour. In Slavonic manuals of icon-painting, the word for ‘gold’ is svet, which means ‘light’. Gold is a gloom-dispelling force. It is accurate to describe the art of the Orthodox icon as ‘writing in gold’; equally felicitous to think of these icons set up as panels to catch and reflect divine light.
Eastern Christendom was not isolated in its quandary over religious imagery. Around the year 600, the bishop of Marseilles in the south of France had conducted a purge of images throughout his episcopal territory. No doubt he thought he was acting well, but he received a letter of rebuke from Pope Gregory the Great.
‘It is one thing to worship a painting, and quite another to learn from a scene represented in a painting what ought to be worshipped. For what writing provides for people who can read, paintings provide to the illiterate who behold them … Paintings are books for the uneducated … [who] from looking at things achieved [res gestae] come to feel ardent compunction.’
108 Christ in Glory by Andrei Rublyov, c.1410–15.
So the Roman church of the West also gave imagery an edifying role, and, in Gregory’s final quoted phrase, a purpose of distinctly emotional stimulation. Here ‘compunction’ is a key word of physiological sensibility. It means a pricking of the flesh, a mingled feeling of discomfort, pathos and remorse.To call it ‘ardent’ may imply the burning painfulness of this sensation, yet it is highly desirable. It is the Christian conscience.
Gregory’s dictum is often cited as a commendation of religious images as ‘the Bible for illiterates’; but the signal it gives about deliberately affective art is historically more important than that.Western Christians, it is true, would subsequently debate the limits of artistic expression in divine and votive imagery, and there were local and periodic outbreaks of iconoclasm or censure. But there was essentially no stopping the development of a truly pathetic Christian iconography as sanctioned by Gregory’s words. It is the iconography that must show, for the sake of arousing compunction in its viewers, Christ not glorying on the cross, but hurting there. It is the iconography of martyrs gaining sainthood by bloodshed. It is more about trial than triumph. It wants beholders to feel bad – sinful – before they feel good.
Examples of this art survive in huge quantity – if not so often within the places of worship for which it was originally designed, then put on show in the world’s galleries and museums for secular aesthetic reverence.The very richness of production says something in itself. Like the Buddhists before them, some Christians opted for the reclusive piety of monastic living, following the lead of St Anthony (in fourth-century Egypt), St Benedict (in sixth-century Italy) and others. But while frugality of lifestyle was a cornerstone of such conventual communities, that did not prevent them from being industrious and growing wealthy.The papacy, too, became a major landholding power. (Gregory was one among a number of popes who were shrewd managers of worldly affairs.) In short, the Church established itself as a well-resourced patron of art.
One entrepreneurial twelfth-century monk in central France, Abbot Suger, president over the abbey and church of Saint-Denis, left a generous testament of why he sought to make his domain a treasury of objets d’art and natural valuables – golden vessels, precious stones and rare minerals. Between 1137 and 1148 he supervised the abbey’s reconstruction and refurbishment as an imposing Gothic monument, its towers, vaults and pointed arches designed to make a v
ertical statement of divine glory. All expense on the building could be justified in the same way as investment in costly art and jewels: as an act of praise in honour of a bountiful God. Suger paid no heed to contemporary dissidents, notably St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who complained that lavish structures and intricate decoration distracted the mind from prayer with ‘elegant deformity and formless elegance’. St Bernard’s order of monks (known as Cistercian because it was based in Cîteaux) inhabited studiously austere surrounds. At Suger’s Saint-Denis, by contrast, everything was made of the finest materials by the best craftsmen. Even the simple career of St Benedict was celebrated in expensive stained glass (Fig. 109).
From a distance, the garnering-up of earthly riches by Abbot Suger can look like sheer greed. But his justification of it reveals a mind dominated by the same understanding as prevailed among the ancient Greeks: that visual access to deities came about through the shaping of rare natural substance by rare human artifice. Sometimes the rare natural substance might suffice as it was. As the Italian scholar and novelist Umberto Eco has concluded, medieval Europeans ‘inhabited a world filled with references, reminders and overtones of divinity, manifestations of God in things. Nature spoke to them heraldically: lions or nut-trees were more than they seemed; griffins were just as real as lions because, like them, they were signs of higher truth.’