Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

557
SCULPTURE
BYZANTINE.]
seat of all the mediseval arts soon after the transference
thither of the headquarters of the empire. The plastic
arts of Byzantium were for a while dominated by the
survival of the dull classic art of the extreme decadence,
but soon fresh life and vigour of conception were gained
by a people who were not without the germinating seeds
of a new aesthetic development. The bronze statue of St
Peter in his Roman basilica is an early work which shows
some promise of what was to come in the far-off future;
though classical in its main lines and stiff in treatment,
it possesses a simple dignity and force which were far
beyond the powers of any mere copyist of classic sculp¬
ture.1 Very early in the 5th or 6th century a school of
decorative sculpture arose at Byzantium which produced
work, such as carved foliage on capitals and bands of orna¬
ment, possessed of the very highest decorative power and
executed with unrivalled spirit and vigour. The early
Byzantine treatment of the acanthus or thistle, as seen in
the capitals of S. Sophia at Constantinople, the Golden
Gate at Jerusalem, and many other buildings in the East,
has never since been surpassed in any purely decorative
sculpture; and it is interesting to note how it grew out
of the dull and lifeless ornamentation which covers the
degraded Corinthian capital used so largely in Roman
buildings of the time of Constantine and his sons. It
was, however, especially in the production of Metal-work
{q.v.) that the early Byzantines were so famous, and this
notably in the manipulation of the precious metals, which
were then used in the most lavish way to decorate and
furnish the great churches of the empire. This extended
use of gold and silver strongly influenced their sculpture,
even when the material was marble or bronze, and caused
an amount of delicate surface-ornament to be used which
was sometimes injurious to the breadth and simplicity of
their reliefs. For many centuries the art of Byzantium,
at least in its higher forms, made little or no progress,
mainly owing to the tyrannical influence of the church and
its growing suspicion of anything like sensual beauty. A
large party in the Eastern Church decided that all repre¬
sentations of Christ must be “without form or comeliness,”
and that it was impious to carve or paint Him with any
of the beauty and nobility of the pagan gods. Moreover,
the artists of Byzantium were fettered by the strictest rules
as to the proper way in which to portray each sacred figure:
every saint had to be represented in a certain attitude, with
one fixed cast of face and arrangement of drapery, and even
in certain definitely prescribed colours. Ho deviation from
these rules was permitted, and thus stereotyped patterns
were created and followed in the most rigid and conventional
manner. Hence in Byzantine art from the 6th to the 12th
century a miniature painting in an illuminated MS. looks
like a reduced copy of a colossal glass mosaic; and no
design had much special relation to the material it was
to be executed in : it was much the same whether it was
intended to be a large relief sculptured in stone or a minute
piece of silver-work for the back of a textus.
Influence Till about the 12th century, and in some places much
of Byzan-later, the art of Byzantium dominated that of the whole
tine art. Q^j-igtian world in a very remarkable way. From Russia
to Ireland and from Norway to Spain any given work of
art in one of the countries of Europe might almost equally
well have been designed in any other. Little or no local
peculiarities can be detected, except of course in the methods
of execution, and even these were wonderfully similar
everywhere. The dogmatic unity of the Catholic Church
and its great monastic system, with constant interchange
of monkish craftsmen between one country and another,
1 There is no ground for the popular impression that this is an
antique statue of Jupiter transformed into that of St Peter by the
addition of the keys.
were the chief causes of this widespread monotony of
style. An additional reason was the unrivalled technical
skill of the early Byzantines, which made their city widely
resorted to by the artist-craftsmen of all Europe,—the
great school for learning any branch of the arts.
The extensive use of the precious metals for the chief
works of plastic art in this early period is one of the reasons
why so few examples still remain,—their great intrinsic
value naturally causing their destruction. One of the
most important existing examples, dating from the 8th
century, is a series of colossal wall reliefs executed in hard
stucco in the church of Cividale (Friuli) not far from Trieste.
These represent rows of female saints bearing jewelled
crosses, crowns, and wreaths, and closely resembling in cos¬
tume, attitude, and arrangement the gift-bearing mosaic
figures of Theodora and her ladies in S. Vitale at Ravenna.
It is a striking instance of the almost petrified state of
Byzantine art that so close a similarity should be possible
between works executed at an interval of fully two hundred
years. Some very interesting small plaques of ivory in
the library of St Gall show a still later survival of early
forms. The central relief is a figure of Christ in Majesty,
and closely resembles those in the colossal apse mosaic of
S. Apollinare in Classe and other churches of Ravenna;
while the figures below the Christ are survivals of a still
older time, dating back from the best eras of classic art.
A river-god is represented as an old man holding an urn,
from which a stream issues, and a reclining female figure
with an infant and a cornucopia is the old Roman Tellus
or Earth-goddess with her ancient attributes.2
It will be convenient to discuss the sculpture of the
mediseval and modern periods under the heads of the chief
countries of Europe.
England.—During the Saxon period, when stone build¬
ings were rare and even large cathedrals were built of
wood, the plastic arts were mostly confined to the use of
gold, silver, and gilt copper. The earliest existing speci- Church¬
mens of sculpture in stone are a number of tall churchyard yard
crosses, mostly in the northern provinces and apparently C10SS
the work of Scandinavian sculptors. One very remarkable
example is a tall monolithic cross, cut in sandstone, in the
churchyard of Gosforth in Cumberland. It is covered
with rudely carved reliefs, small in scale, which are of
special interest as showing a transitional state from the
worship of Odin to that of Christ. Some of the old Norse
symbols and myths sculptured on it occur modified and
altered into a semi-Christian form. Though rich in decora¬
tive effect and with a graceful outline, this sculptured cross
shows a very primitive state of artistic development, as do
the other crosses of this class in Cornwall, Ireland, and
Scotland, which are mainly ornamented with those ingeni¬
ously intricate patterns of interlacing knotwork designed
so skilfully by both the early Norse and the Celtic races.3
They belong to a class of art which is not Christian in its
origin, though it was afterwards largely used for Christian
purposes, and so is thoroughly national in style, quite free
from the usual widespread Byzantine influence. Of special
interest from their early date—probably the 11th century
—are two large stone reliefs now in Chichester cathedral,
which are traditionally said to have come from the pre-
Norman church at Selsey. They are thoroughly Byzantine
in style, but evidently the work of some very ignorant
sculptor; they represent two scenes in the Raising of
2 On early and mediaeval sculpture in ivory consult Gori, Thesaurus
Veterum Diptychorum, Florence, 1759 ; Westwood, Diptychs of Consuls,
London, 1862; Didron, Images ouvrantes du Louvre, Paris, 1871;
Masked, Ivories in the South Kensington Museum, London, 1872 ;
Wieseler, Diptychon Quirinianum zu Brescia, Gottingen, 1868 ;
Wyatt and Oldfield, Sculpture in Ivory, London, 1856.
3 See O’Neill, Sculptured Crosses of Ireland, London, 1857.