ARCHANGEL MICHAEL IVORY Another ivory panel (FIG.
12-15), created somewhat earlier than the Barberini Ivory and like-
wise carved in the Eastern Christian Empire, perhaps in Constan-
tinople, offers further evidence of the persistence of classical art. The
panel, the largest extant Byzantine ivory, is all that is preserved from a
hinged diptych in the Early Christian tradition. It depicts Saint
Michael the Archangel, patron of the imperial church of Hagia
Sophia. The inscription opens with the words “Receive these gifts.”
The dedication is perhaps a reference to the cross-surmounted orb of
power the archangel once offered to a Byzantine emperor depicted on
the missing diptych leaf. The prototype of Michael must have been a
pagan winged Victory, although Victory was personified as a woman
in Greco-Roman art and usually carried a palm branch, as does the
Victory on the Barberini Ivory.The Christian artist here ingeniously
adapted a pagan motif and imbued it with new meaning.
The archangel’s flowing drapery, which reveals the body’s
shape, the delicately incised wings, and the facial type and coiffure
are other indications that the artist who carved this ivory was still
working in the tradition of classical art. Nonetheless, the Byzantine
ivory carver had little concern for the rules of naturalistic represen-
tation. The archangel dwarfs the architectural setting. Michael’s feet,
for example, rest on three steps at once, and his upper body, wings,
and arms are in front of the column shafts while his lower body is
behind the column bases at the top of the receding staircase. These
spatial ambiguities, of course, do not detract from the figure’s strik-
ing beauty, but they do signify the emergence of the same new aes-
thetic already noted in the mosaics of Ravenna. Here, as there, the
Byzantine artist rejected the goal of most classical artists: to render
the three-dimensional world in convincing and consistent fashion
and to people that world with fully modeled figures firmly rooted on
the ground. Michael seems more to float in front of the architecture
than to stand in it.
VIENNA DIOSKORIDESThe physical world was the focus,
however, of one of the rare secular books to survive from the early
Middle Ages, either in Byzantium or the West. In the mid-first cen-
tury, a Greek physician named Dioskorides compiled an encyclope-
dia of medicinal herbs called De materia medica.An early-sixth-
century copy of this manual, nearly a thousand pages in length, is in
the Austrian National Library. TheVienna Dioskorides,as it is called,
was a gift from the people of Honoratai, near Constantinople, to
Anicia Juliana, daughter of the short-lived Emperor of the West,
Anicias Olybrias (r. 472). Anicia Juliana was a leading patron of the
arts and had built a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary at Hono-
ratai in 512. She also provided the funds to erect Saint Polyeuktos in
Constantinople between 524 and 527. The excavated ruins of that
church indicate that it was a domed basilica—an important forerun-
ner of the pioneering design of Justinian’s Hagia Sophia.
The Vienna Dioskorides contains 498 illustrations, almost all
images of plants rendered with a scientific fidelity to nature that
stands in stark contrast to contemporary Byzantine paintings and
mosaics of religious subjects. It is likely that the Vienna Dioskorides324 Chapter 12 BYZANTIUM12-15Saint Michael the Archangel, right leaf of a diptych, early sixth
century. Ivory, 1 5 5 –^12 . British Museum, London.
The sculptor who carved this largest extant Byzantine ivory panel
modeled Saint Michael on a classical winged Victory, but the archangel
seems to float in front of the architecture rather than stand in it.1 in.12-15AThrone
of Maximianus,
ca. 546–556.