Epigrams on Works of Art 179the historical continuum of the past and the present. The late antique chariot-
eers were there, on the ceiling of the imperial gallery, to remind viewers of the
everlasting imperial grandeur – dim figures of the past, but alive in the present.
Who they really were and what they had actually achieved in times past, was
utterly irrelevant as long as appearances were kept up and people could pre-
tend that nothing had changed in the course of time. The pictures of the
charioteers in the imperial gallery had no historical dimension, but merely
served to emphasize the concept of imperial victory at its brightest and to
highlight the imperturbability and permanence of the imperial institution
itself.
It is not known what the pictures looked like. In almost all the epigrams
the pictures of the charioteers are said to be so lifelike that it is as if the
charioteers are poised to race upwards, straight into heaven where they will
receive their crowns. And in APl 382. 1 and 384. 2 the ceiling on which the
charioteers were depicted is called a dömoß, a vault^74. It would seem, therefore,
that the four charioteers were depicted each in one quarter of the inside of a
vault, with their chariots and their horses moving upwards^75. There is no need
to assume that the tenth-century artists imitated late antique art, only be-
cause the pictures they made portrayed famous charioteers of the past. Since
those responsible for the iconographic programme of the imperial gallery were
not interested in historical accuracy, there is no reason why the late antique
charioteers should have been depicted exactly as they were represented in the
Hippodrome. And although the decoration of the parakyptikön formed an
artistic response to the literary movement of classicism, the pictures were not
necessarily classicizing. The “oriental” representations of charioteers on
eighth- and ninth-century silks (the Aachen-Cluny textile and, especially, the
beautiful Münsterbilsen textile)^76 probably form a splendid illustration of the
kind of pictures that could once be found on the ceiling of the imperial gallery.
On the Münsterbilsen textile we see four horses lifting their front legs and the
charioteer raising his hands upward. There is a perpendicular movement in this
picture, just as required by the text of the Byzantine epigrams on the chariot-
eers. Up they go, ascending to heaven.
**
*
(^74) See CAMERON 1973: 201 and 205.
(^75) Compare, for instance, the vault mosaic in the Capella Arcivescovile of the Cathedral of
Ravenna, where we see four slender angels rising upwards to support the chi-ro medal-
lion in the centre: see J. LOWDEN, Early Christian & Byzantine Art. London 1997, fig. 66.
(^76) See CAMERON 1973: figs. 26 and 27. Cf. the eighth-century solar table in the Vatican
Ptolemy (Vat. gr. 1291), showing the emperor/sun and his four-horse chariot at the
centre of the zodiac.