This absence of any real living development was due to the fact that paintings of all kinds in the Eastern Church, from a colossal mural picture down to a manuscript miniature, were produced by ecclesiastics and for the Church, under a strictly applied series of hieratic rules.
| Hieratic rules. |
Hieratic rules.The drawing, the pose, the colours of the drapery of every Saint, and the scheme of composition of all sacred figure subjects came gradually to be defined by ecclesiastic rules, which each painter was bound to obey. Thus it happens that during the many centuries which are covered by the Byzantine style of art, though there are periods of decay and revival of artistic skill, yet in style there is the most remarkable monotony. This makes it specially difficult to judge from internal evidence of the date of a Byzantine painting. In manuscripts the palaeographic, not the artistic evidence, is the best guide, aided of course by various small technical peculiarities, and also by the amount of skill and power of drawing which is displayed in the paintings.
| Absence of change. |
Absence of change.Long after the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Byzantine style of painting survived; and even at the present day the monks of Mt Athos execute large wall paintings, which, as far as their style is concerned, might appear to be the work of many centuries ago. M. Didron found the monastic painters in one of the Mount Athos monasteries using a treatise called the Ἑρμηνεία τῆς ζωγραφικῆς, in which directions are given how every figure and subject is to be treated, and which describes the old traditional forms without any perceptible modification[[32]]. The proportions of the human form are laid down after the characteristic slender Byzantine models, the complete body, for example, being nine heads in height.
| 5th century MS. of Genesis. Weak drawing. |
5th century MS. of Genesis.The earliest Byzantine manuscript which is now known to exist is a fragment of the Book of Genesis, now in the Imperial library of Vienna, which dates from the latter part of the fifth century. This fragment consists of twenty-four leaves of purple-dyed vellum, illuminated with miniatures on both sides. In the main the designs are feeble in composition and weak in drawing, belonging rather to the latest decadence of Roman classical art than to the yet undeveloped Byzantine style, which was soon to grow into great artistic spirit and strong decorative power, a completely new birth of aesthetic conceptions, the brilliance of which is the more striking from its following so closely on the degraded, lifeless, worn-out art of the Western Empire. In this manuscript of Genesis there is but little promise of the Renaissance that was so near at hand. Weak drawing.The drawing of each figure, though sometimes graceful in pose, is rather weak, and the painter has hardly aimed at anything like real composition; his figures merely stand in long rows, with little or nothing to group them together. Fig. [6] shows examples of two of the best miniatures, representing the story of the accusation of Joseph by Potiphar's wife. In every way this Genesis manuscript forms a striking contrast to the delicate beauty and strongly decorative feeling which are to be seen in a work of but a few years later, the famous Dioscorides of the Princess Juliana.
| The Dioscorides of c. 500 A.D. |
The Dioscorides of c. 500 A.D.Among all the existing Byzantine manuscripts perhaps the most important for its remarkable beauty as well as its early date is this Greek codex[[33]] of Dioscorides' work on Botany, which is now in the Imperial library in Vienna[[34]], No. 5 in the Catalogue. The date of this manuscript can be fixed to about the year 500 A.D. by the record which it contains of its having been written and illuminated for the Princess Juliana Anicia, the daughter of Flavius Anicius Olybrius who was Emperor for part of the year 472, and his wife Galla Placidia: Juliana Anicia died in 527.
