Byzantine Art

The start of the Middle Ages is often called the Dark Ages. This lasted for
about five hundred years – from 500 to 1000 A.D.
Most art was produced for the Church. After a while, the Church divided into
two – the Catholic Church in the west, centred in Rome, and the Eastern
Orthodox Church, centred in Byzantium, a city in what is now Turkey which
the Romans called Constantinople (after the Emperor Constantine) and which
is now called Istanbul. The main form of art in the western Church was
Romanesque, while the main form in the eastern Church was Byzantine.

Byzantium
Roman Catholic Church

Eastern Orthodox Church

 Byzantine art did not start exactly in 500 A.D. and
end five hundred years later; it began not long after
Byzantium was founded in 324 A.D., and it was
much less popular after Arab Muslims took the city
in the seventh century. The building left was a
Christian Church, then a Muslim mosque. The large
signs are from the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

Muslims followed a rule that people should not

make images of human bodies, in case they
worshipped them as idols. Many
Christians who are neither Catholic nor
Orthodox still think that there should be
no sculptures or pictures of people – even
of Jesus or the saints – in Churches. Yet
Byzantine art can still be found in
Orthodox Churches today.
1. Which would be better to help people
worship God – the writings or the picture?
Artists did not try to make their paintings look like
something real; most of their art was produced for
Churches, so was of Jesus, or his mother the Virgin
Mary, or of saints (holy men). No-one knew what any
of these people had looked like; so instead of trying
to make them look real, artists made them look like
special human beings. In the past, Greek and Roman
artists had made sculptures of people so they looked
like perfect people, with handsome faces and
muscled bodies; yet Byzantine artists were more
interested in making Jesus, Mary and the saints look
as if they were perfect “inside” – their minds and
hearts were truly good, so they were holy and godly
people. As a result, the great skills of Greek and
Roman sculptors were lost.
2. How has the Greek sculptor who made his statue
made it look lifelike?
However Byzantine artists developed other skills.
They learned to make objects from gold, silver and
precious stones – as well as pottery – which were as
good as what the Greeks and Romans created.
They even gained new skills, in creating mosaics and
icons. The skills they used in the building which was
the Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom”) cathedral in
Byzantium (page 3) were just as amazing as those used
in creating the grand buildings of the ancient world.
Jesus Pantocrator (“Creator of all” - right) looks down
on the magnificent cathedral.

3. In the mosaic, Jesus looks still and flat. There is no

sign of movement, and no shadow. He does not
seem to be in the “real world”. Why would
Christians 1500 years ago think this was important?
Byzantine art was meant to be not realistic but symbolic.
Angels had wings, to show that they are God’s messengers – like
carrier pigeons, carrying God’s messages through the air to
human beings.
Important people (particularly Jesus and Mary, but also saints)
were often larger than ordinary people. Often they would look
down on ordinary people from above (perhaps in the sky). Often,
around their heads they had
haloes. These looked like suns
– in fact they were first used by
people who believed in the sun-
god, then by Roman emperors.

4. When artists gave Jesus a

halo, what were they saying
about him?
 The Church used haloes with Jesus, showing that
he is the Head (the emperor) of the Church.
Eventually haloes were used of saints to show that
the Light of Christ shone through their teachings.
Usually either the figures or the background
would be golden.
The people in the
picture would often be
shown in dark colours,
to contrast with the bright gold behind them.
They would look quite serious; religion was not
something to laugh about. Sometimes behind
Jesus’s head would be a cross, showing that he
died on the cross.
5. Why was gold often used in these pictures?
 Because artists were not
showing Jesus, Mary and
the saints as ordinary
human beings, they did
not show them in real
situations, and they made

their images flat, with no shadows, and no perspective

(so far-away objects did not look smaller than close
objects, unless they were important). What mattered to
was that the most important people be biggest.
6. Apart from Jesus, figures in icon often have bowed
heads. Why do you think this might be?
One way in which Orthodox Churches were different from
Catholic Churches was that Orthodox Churches had icons
– paintings of Jesus, of the Virgin Mary, or a saint, with
a gold background - whereas Catholic Churches were
more likely to have statues. In some early icons, artists
make made Jesus look human; in some later icons,
artists want to show him as God. After Muslims arrived in
Byzantium, the Emperor Leo III began the “Iconoclastic”
Period (Iconoclasm means destroying icons) which
lasted for over a hundred years (from 730 to 843). After
this artists became more interested in the sculptures of
Classical Greece and Rome, and became more skilled in
their artwork – especially the way they showed the
human body; they started showing Jesus as human
again. In 1204 knights from Europe took Byzantium,
replacing the Byzantine style with the Romanesque style.

7. This icon is one of the earliest ever made. Does Jesus

look more like God or a man? Why?