Art of the Byzantine World [antikvár]

Introduction "Roman statecraft, Greek culture, and Christian belief are the three wellheads of Byzantine development. If any of these three had been missing, Byzantium as we know it could not have existed. It was only the synthesis of Hellenistic culture and the Christian religion with Roman governmental forms which could have caused that historical phenomenon, known as the Byzantine state, to arise" (G. Ostrogorsky). These constituents of Byzantium as a power are also recognizable in the history of what was to become more or less an official and imperial art. But if there had been nothing beyond these three, then obviously "Byzantine art" might equally have been born in Rome, a city where the imperial system had been evolved, which was steeped in Hellenistic culture, and where the presence of Saint Peter's tomb supplied the earliest of all justifications for establishing the Christian Church. Clearly the synthesis, in the form it finally assumed, could only have been achieved in specific conditions and required outside elements which did not exist in Rome at that time. When we speak today of Byzantine art, we are not setting it within strictly geographical limits but referring to the art of a world within a world, the expansion and contraction of which was continually conditioned by the vicissitudes of politics. From its earliest years, this art was based on one capital city, the seat of an Emperor who was simultaneously sovereign prince and high priest. It is an art whidi enridied that of the Western world yet remained largely independent of reciprocal influences from it. In this characteristic self-sufficiency, which showed itself in a quite individual attitude to the classical inheritance, lies our justification for treating Byzantine art as a phenomenon apart and not as a chapter in the continuous history of Western art, nor even as a parallel development toudiing it at certain points and moving along at the same pace. In spheres other than that of art, there was of course an inevitable linking, since the tedinical and other discoveries of an epoch end up by being shared, and historical events affect communities other than those immediately implicated. When Constantine founded his capital of Constantinople on the site of the ancient Byzantium, the art of the Western world was in a period of decline. When Justinian was building up his empire of the East, that of the West was disintegrating as a result of the mass migrations whidi were weakening its structure. By the time of the Renaissance, the fifteenth-century cultural revival which brought classical art to life again, the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire were falling into the hands of the conquering Turks. Between the collapse of the old Roman Empire and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantine Empire flourished as a highly organized state; for many of those centuries it was the only one in the whole of the then known world. Starting with this advantage, and favored by its geographical location, its political and cultural strivings soon took on a peculiar importance. The Mediterranean basin was the center of Western classical art and political power, and in the middle of it lay Rome, whidi in the outgoing classical period had seized the leadership of that worid before Constantinople was founded. It was not only the foundation of Constantinople which marked the division of the western Mediterranean worid from the eastern but also the division of the Roman Empire into separate halves which henceforth became independent. The consequent regrouping and redistribution of powers and privileges brought about a situation in which the claims of the East could no longer be brushed aside. When Theodosius I died in 395, he left the two parts of his empire to his two