Epigrams on Works of Art 159interpreted. “The art is thine, O Word”. Images need words. The mosaic is
adorned with a verse inscription because that is the best way to ensure that the
Divine Word listens to Geometres’ plea, which is not only visualized in art, but
also expressed in poetic words.
It is worth noticing that Geometres uses the active voice (Çgrave) to
indicate his role in the manufacturing of the mosaic that he commissioned. As
it is out of the question that an army officer, such as Geometres, had the
technical ability to make a mosaic, the verb does not mean that he himself
produced the mosaic, but that he ordered artists to make it and paid for the
costs. This would seem obvious enough, but regrettably many scholars confuse
donors and painters because Byzantine epigrams and verse inscriptions do not
distinguish between “having something made” and “making something”^26. The
active voice (“he/she painted”, “he/she built”, etc.) nearly always indicates
that the person who is said to have made a work of art, made it possible by
providing the money for it. There are very few exceptions to this rule. For
instance, there is an epigram that tells us that Thomas the Painter donated an
Üeloyrg5a to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in the early ninth
century^27. Since he is called a fzgr1óoß, it is reasonable to assume that he
himself made the work of glass (either a mosaic or an enamel^28 ).
Since we have very little information, other than the works of art and the
inscriptions themselves, on the way artefacts were manufactured in Byzanti-
um, it is impossible to establish precisely what the act of commissioning a work
of art actually entailed, and what the initial stage of production was like. Say
that a donor ordered a portrait of St. Nicholas: did he just place his order and
then leave the atelier, or did he give detailed instructions to the artist telling
him what the portrait should be like and what its pictorial message should be?
This is something we do not know. The term “patronage” should therefore be
used with extreme caution. If the term simply indicates that a specific donor
(^26) See, for instance, N. OIKONOMIDES, in: Artistes, artisans et production artistique au
moyen âge. Paris 1986, 47–48 (repr. in: idem, Byzantium from the Ninth Century to the
Fourth Crusade. London 1992, no. XI), who attributes the painting of an icon to
Emperor Romanos Argyros. In fact, Romanos Argyros is not the famous emperor, the
icon is not painted but in mosaic, and the donor did not produce the mosaic himself, but
commissioned it. For the epigrams on the mosaics in the Argyros monastery and their
donor, see pp. 184–186 and 323.
(^27) See A. FROLOW, Bulletin des Études Orientales de l’Institut Français de Damas 11 (1945–
46) 121–130 and E. FOLLIERI, Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Rendiconti 371
(1974) 1–21.
(^28) It is difficult to understand what the Byzantines mean exactly when they say that a
work of art is made of glass. See, for instance, Geometres, Cr. 301, 1–8, where he
describes a picture of the archangels in glass: is this a mosaic of glass cubes, an enamel
or a window of stained glass?