256 i Flora Unveiled
naturalistic portraits, fused with Eastern artistic traditions, becoming more stylized and
decorative—as exemplified by the mosaic of Empress Theodora (wife of Justinian) and her
retinue at the church of San Vitale in Ravenna (Figure 10.2B).
Princess Juliana is clearly a transitional figure, representing the old guard of the Roman
Empire, while the younger Justinian and Theodora embody the new Byzantine spirit of the
Early Middle Ages. According to Minta Collins, the Juliana Anicia Codex was intended
to serve more as a “volume of antiquarian, literary, and even sentimental interest” than as
a practical medical text.^9 Collins’s hypothesis should be kept in mind when evaluating the
extreme range of styles of the plant “portraits” contained in the herbal.
As previously noted, the 435 plant illustrations of the Juliana Anicia Codex are highly vari-
able in style and quality, ranging from the naturalistic and recognizable (Figure 10.3A– D)
to the stylized and unrecognizable (Figure 10.3E). It has long been an article of faith that
the plant illustrations in the Codex must have been copied from earlier Greek herbals
because Byzantine artists, steeped in the mystical, otherworldly philosophy of the Eastern
Orthodox Church, regarded the natural world as inherently sinful and unworthy of study
by devout Christians, whose minds ought to be focused on eternity, scripture, and the
purity of their souls.
Byzantine artists employed an iconographic style patterned after the stylized religious
icons of saints that were, and still are, prevalent in the Eastern Church. They made no
attempt to portray likenesses, and, in any event, the facial features of most saints were
unknown. Religious symbols were therefore added to differentiate one saint from another.
The goals of the Byzantine iconographic artists were thus antithetical to the basic function
of the Greek illustrated herbal, which was to serve as a practical guide for the identification
of medicinal plants in the field. Charles Singer has argued that the Byzantine artists who
illustrated the Juliana Anicia Codex had lost the ability to paint directly from nature.^10
Based on the assumption that the plant illustrations of the Juliana Anicia Codex must have
been copied from previous herbals, Singer postulated that the most naturalistic paintings
(d)Figure 10.1 Continued