326 Chapter 12 BYZANTIUMB
yzantine icons(“images” in Greek) are small portable paint-
ings depicting Christ, the Virgin, or saints (or a combination
of all three, as in fig. 12-18). Icons survive from as early as the fourth
century. From the sixth century on, they became enormously popu-
lar in Byzantine worship, both public and private. Eastern Christians
considered icons a personal, intimate, and indispensable medium
for spiritual transaction with holy figures. Some icons (for example,
fig. 12-29) came to be regarded as wonder-working, and believers as-
cribed miracles and healing powers to them.
Icons were by no means universally accepted, however. From the
beginning, many Christians were deeply suspicious of the practice of
imaging the divine, whether on portable panels, on the walls of
churches, or especially as statues that reminded them of pagan idols.
The opponents of Christian figural art had in mind the Old Testa-
ment prohibition of images the Lord dictated to Moses in the Second
Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the
earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not
bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Exod. 20:4, 5). For exam-
ple, early in the fourth century, Constantia, sister of the emperor
Constantine, requested an image of Christ from Eusebius, the first
great historian of the Christian Church. He rebuked her, referring to
the Second Commandment:
Can it be that you have forgotten that passage in which God lays
down the law that no likeness should be made of what is in heaven
or in the earth beneath?... Are not such things banished and ex-
cluded from churches all over the world, and is it not common
knowledge that such practices are not permitted to us... lest we
appear, like idol worshipers, to carry our God around in an image?*
Opposition to icons became especially strong in the eighth cen-
tury, when the faithful often burned incense and knelt before them
in prayer to seek protection or a cure for illness. Although icons were
intended only to evoke the presence of the holy figures addressed in
prayer, in the minds of many people, icons became identified with
the personages represented. Icon veneration became confused with
idol worship, and this brought about an imperial ban on the making
of icons, followed by the wholesale wreckage of sacred images (icon-
oclasm). The iconoclasts (breakers of images) and the iconophiles
(lovers of images) became bitter and irreconcilable enemies. The an-
guish of the latter can be gleaned from a graphic description of the
deeds of the iconoclasts, written in about 754:
In every village and town one could witness the weeping and lamen-
tation of the pious, whereas, on the part of the impious, [one saw]
sacred things trodden upon, [liturgical] vessels turned to other use,
churches scraped down and smeared with ashes because they con-
tained holy images. And wherever there were venerable images of
Christ or the Mother of God or the saints, these were consigned to
the flames or were gouged out or smeared over.†The consequences of iconoclasm for the history of Byzantine
art are difficult to overstate. For more than a century, not only did
the portrayal of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints cease, but the icon-
oclasts also destroyed countless works from the early centuries of
Christendom. Assembling a complete history of Early Byzantine art
presents a great challenge to art historians.Icons and Iconoclasm
ART AND SOCIETY
- Cyril Mango, trans.,The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453: Sources and Documents (reprint of 1972 ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 17–18.
† Ibid., 152.
12-18Virgin (Theotokos) and Child between Saints Theodore and
George,icon, sixth or early seventh century. Encaustic on wood, 2 3
1 73 – 8 . Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai, Egypt.
Byzantine icons continued the Roman tradition of painting on wood
panels (FIGS. 10-62 and 10-63), but their style as well as the Christian
subjects broke sharply from classical models.1 in.