IMAGES OF CHRIST AND BYZANTINE BELIEFSAuthor(s): Barry BaldwinSource: Aevum, Anno 58, Fasc. 2 (maggio-agosto 1984), pp. 144-148Published by: Vita e Pensiero – Pubblicazioni dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro CuoreStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20857844 .

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MISCELLANEA

IMAGES OF CHRIST AND BYZANTINE BELIEFS

In his recent and provocative book1, Cyril Mango reiterates an old 2 contention: ?In the literature of the Iconoclastic period no one, if I am not mistaken, thought of posing the practical question: How do we know the icon is a likeness ? What evi

dence, for example, do we have that St. Peter had a hooked nose and curly grey hair? Even if he had, is it sufficient to depict a man with a hooked nose and curly grey hair to obtain the exact likeness of St. Peter? The inability to ask such questions and to see the problem of the icon in terms other than theological ones reveals a general truth about their artistic intuition. Theirs was an art unconcerned with the indivi dual and the particular ?.

This does not seem altogether fair to the Byzantines. The first stirrings of ico noclast sentiment can be seen in the fourth century, precisely when pictorial repre sentations of Christian history, if not of Christ himself ,were becoming common 3.

The debate involved historical as well as theological perspectives. Thus, Eusebius

(HE 7, 18) describes a statue he saw at Caesarea which was said to resemble the fea tures of Christ, and he personally examined coloured portraits of Jesus, Peter, and

Paul. Later in the same century, that fiery character Epiphanius of Salamis employed the historical argument for his attack on religious art. In the circumstances, it seems

appropriate to quote him in Mango's own translation 4: ? Which of the ancient Fa thers ever painted an image of Christ and deposited it in a church or in a private house? Which ancient bishop ever dishonoured Christ by painting him on door cur tains? . . . Furthermore, they lie by representing the appearance of saints in different forms according to their whim, sometimes delineating the same persons as old men, sometimes as youths, intruding into things which they have not seen. For they paint

1 Byzantium, London 1980, pp. 267-268. 2 Cf. his Art of the Byzantine Empire: Sources and documents, Englewood Cliffs 1972, p. 150. Hereinafter,

this will be referred to as Sources. 3 See E. J. Martin, A History of the iconoclastic controversy, London 1930 (repr. New York 1978),

pp. 18-20; L. W. Barnard, The Graeco-Roman and Oriental background of the iconoclastic controversy, Leiden 1974, pp. 89-91. Modern scholarly debate and the vast secondary literature can best be sampled in A. Bryer - J. Herrin (eds.), Iconoclasm, Birmingham 1975. Basic texts are conveniently assembled

by H. Hennephof, Textus Byzantini ad Iconomachiam Pertinentes, Leiden 1969. 4 Sources, pp. 41-42. For the text of these fragments of Epiphanius, now generally considered ge

nuine after some earlier modern scepticism, see G. Ostrogorsky, Studien zur Geschichte des byzantini schen Bilderstreites, Breslau 1929, also H. Hennephof, Textus..., cit., pp. 44-51.

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IMAGES OF CHRIST AND BYZANTINE BELIEFS 145

the Saviour with long hair, and this by conjecture because He is called a Nazarene and Nazarenes wear long hair. They are in error, those who try attach stereotypes to Him: for the Saviour drank wine, whereas the Nazarenes did not. In this, too, they lie that they invent things according to their whim. These impostors represent the

holy apostle Peter as an old man with hair and beard cut short; some represent St. Paul as a man with receding hair, others as being bald and bearded, and the other

apostles as being closely cropped

. . . ?.

As catalogued by George the Monk 5, the most famous and venerated images were the picture of Christ sent to King Abgar of Edessa, the statue of Christ and the woman with the issue of blood at Paneas-Caesarea, a portrait of the Virgin made

by St. Luke 6, the portrait of Virgin and Child made for a king of Persia, a miraculous

portrait of the Virgin at Lydda, and pictures of Peter and Paul at Rome. The fact that these supposed antiquities cannot really be traced back earlier that the fourth

century, and only become significant in the sixth, is here immaterial7: what counts is the attempt to base the authenticity of their appearance on historical grounds.

The Eighty-second Canon of the Quinisext Council of 692 commanded that Christ should henceforth be depicted in human form, rather than symbolically as a lamb as hitherto 8. It is no coincidence that this is in the period of Justinian II, the first emperor to put Christ, on his coinage. And, likewise, no coincidence that the iconoclastic controversy itself breaks out in the next century.

One of the many writings spawned by the great controversy is the spurious Letter to the Emperor Theophilus included in the works of St. John Damascene. Written around 847, it is a mine of curious information, including the most elaborate

pen portrait of Christ. The details will be examined later. What does impress is the

way in which the author, although trotting out the usual claims for apostolic tradi tion (the details are those vouchsafed by ? ancient historians ?, Luke's portrait of the Virgin is invoked, and so on), does not reach back earlier than Constantine the Great for the picture itself. It looks very much as though the criticisms of Epipha nius and company have been tacitly conceded and absorbed.

As, indeed, they must have been earlier. Summing up what he calls the ? sim

plistic attitude ? of the Byzantines, Mango quotes Nicephorus 9 to the effect that

the inscription on an image authenticates its veracity. But not all Byzantines were

that naive. Epiphanius and the critics of religious art were not the only ones to ap

preciate that portraits could depend upon the caprice, sometimes fraud, of an artist.

For all his apparent belief in Luke's portrait of the Virgin, Theodore Lector knew that painters had been known discreetly to reprensent Jesus in the likeness of Zeus for pagan patrons, and that pictures of Christ with short curly locks were closer to the truth than ones with hair parted away from the forehead 10.

5 Chron., 2, p. 784; for other references, cf. E. J. Martin, A History..., cit., p. 144, n. 5. 6

Singled out by Theodore Lector, HE 1,1, also by the author of the Pseudo-J. Damascene,

Ep. ad Imp. Theophil., 631; PG 95, 349D. 7 As are such fancies as the one that makes Christ the actual painter of the portrait sent to Abgar

as befitting Christ the logician, poet, rhetorician, and so on; cf. E. Curtius, European literature and the latin Middle Ages, English ed., New York 1963, p. 556.

8 Mansi, Cone., 11, 977E-980B. 9 Antirrheticus, 1, 38: PG 100, 293B. 10 HE 1, 15, excerpted by John Damascene, PG 86. 221A: t6 oftXov xocl 6Xty6Tptxov- The Greek is

distinctive, with o5Xo<; registered in Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon only for the fourth-century Consti tutions apostolorum (ed. Funk), 1, 3,10, and 6Xty66pt$ marked by Lampe as absent from LSJ (an error -

it is in) and noted only in one ms. of Chron. Pasch., p. 375 (PG 92, 957n) referring to Justinian.

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146 B. BALDWIN

Such realisation of the need at least to try and make religious portraits credible was not restricted to the case of Christ. It is a hagiographical motif that artists who wish to portray a saint but who have never seen their subject are guided to a true

picture by dreams in which the hero or heroine appears. Typical examples include the Vita S. Theodorae, 52-54, the Vita S. Mariae junioris, 18, p. 699, and the Vita S. Niconis Metanoeite, p. 124, all drawn from the post-iconoclastic period n.

But needless to say, Christ is uniquely important. Hence, there was some par ticular care taken to ensure that his portraits at least seem to rest upon solid histori

cal evidence. In the essay On Bodily Characteristics, evidently a work of the ninth or tenth century by one Ulpius (or Elpius) the Roman, a collection of notes on the

physical appearance of Adam, the prophets, Christ, Peter and Paul, and eleven church fathers, Christ receives the fullest treatment and the only one that explicitly claims to be derived from ancient historical sources 12.

Ulpius and company were attempting to do for the great figures of Christianity what Byzantine chroniclers and others had done for Homeric heroes. There was a

widespread mania for what have been aptly compared 13 to police descriptions of

wanted men. Sober fact plays no great role in the capsule notices of the leading Greeks and Trojans in Homer routinely supplied by Malalas and other chroniclers, with the details predictably discrepant between one writer and the next14. Another per tinent example of this art, attached to his essay on What Homer Did Not Tell, is the Characterismata of Isaac Porphirogenitus.

Isaac's predilection for pen portraits is shared by his sister Anna Comnena, whose Alexiad is crammed with pen portraits 15. True, Anna's characters are fact, not fiction; but her linguistic and ethical stereotypes are often not very different. Roman and Byzantine emperors are described by chroniclers from Malalas to Ce

drenus in exactly the same style and language: a list of epithets, with compound adjectives especially favoured, is attached to the subject, repeated from character to character. Without knowing who was being described, the reader would often

find it difficult to distinguish (say) Achilles, Peter, or Constantine16.

Ulpius' notice of Christ is in fact reproduced almost verbatim from the afore

mentioned description in the Letter to Theophilus, a tribute to the influence either of that work or of that particular vision of Jesus. The following comparison of the details with those elsewhere in Ulpius and in other sources discloses that in both content and language they create rather less of an interchangeable identikit picture than do the secular chroniclers for their Homeric subjects.

? Of good build ?. The Greek word suvjXi^ is rare 17. It is notably absent from

11 For brevity's sake and the reader's convenience, I have selected examples that can be read, with full information as to editions, in C. Mango, Sources, pp. 210-212, 265.

12 M. Chatzidakis (ed.), ? Epeteris Hetair. Byzant. Spoudon?, XIV (1938), pp. 393-414. Notable absentees from this essay, at least in the form in which we have it, are theTheotokos, albeit the ? wheat like ? colour of Christ's face is said to be inherited from her, and the other apostles. As we have seen, Peter and Paul dominate the tradition. It was their pictures that Eusebius had seen, their pictures at Rome that were included in the canonical catalogue of the most venerable icons, and they who were

responsabile for the New Testament picture cycles; cf. Vita S. Pancratii, p. 75 (ed. Veselovski). 13 By R. Browning, Homer in Byzantium, ? Viator ?, VIII (1975), p. 28. 14 Cf. the percipient notes of the older commentators on Malalas reproduced in Migne's text (PG 97). 15 In the words of G. Buckler, Anna Comnena, Oxford 1929, p. 57: ? No friend or even prominent

enemy can be mentioned without a personal description ?. 16 Cf. my The Physical descriptions of Byzantine Emperors, ? Byzantion ?, LI (1981), pp. 8-21. 17 In what follows, it can be assumed that, unless indicated, the epithet in question is not elsewhere

in Ulpius.

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IMAGES OF CHRIST AND BYZANTINE BELIEFS 147

Lampe. LSJ give references (they vary from edition to edition) to the Physiogno monica of Polemo, John Lydus, and Tzetzes. The first of these comports the greatest interest. The malign influence physiognomy on descriptions in Roman biography

was pointed out long ago 18. Byzantine pen portraiture suffers from the same thing. Handbooks of physiognomy continued to be written and exploited, notably by the fourth century sophist Adamantius of Alexandria 19, contemporary with Ammianus

Marcellinus. This level-headed historian bears witness to the persistence of such

theories in his very first reference to the looks of the emperor Julian: ? Gazing long and earnestly on his eyes, at once terrible and full of charm, and on his face attractive in its unusual animation, they divined what manner of man he would be, as though they had studied those ancient books whose perusal discloses from bodily signs the inner qualities of the soul (15. 8. 15) ?.

?With eyebrows that meet?. The epithet cruvo^pu^, also applied by Ulpius to Peter, describes St. Paul in Ada Pauli et Theclae, 3 (ed. Lipsius-Bonnet, p. 237, 8).

? Of beautiful or sharp eyes ?. The adjective ?i)6cp6aA[Jio<; is ambiguous; Lampe furnishes two examples, one in each sense, from patristic prose.

?With prominent nose ?. The Greek kmppwoc, is also used by Ulpius in his notices of Basil, John Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria. Paul is so described in Ada Pauli et Theclae, 3 (with the qualification ? slightly ?), and in pseudo-Lucian, Philopatris, 12.

?Curly haired?, The epithet ouX60pi? is seemingly rare in patristic Greek; Lampe cites only the present passage (from its source, the Ep. ad TheophiL). LSJ offer examples from Herodotus, Aristotle, and Strabo. Elsewhere in Ulpius, only Cyril of Alexandria is given this attribute. It will be remembered that Theodore Lector

(HE 1, 15) claims pictures showing Christ with short and curly hair are the more authentic.

? Bent over ?. Not in Lampe, the adjective lmxu<po<; is illustrated by LSJ from the Septuagint, a scholiast on Oppian, Halieutica, 1, 342, and the Suda.

? Of fair complexion?. The epithet eu^pou^, also conferred by Ulpius upon Athanasius, is exemplified by Lampe from Gregory of Nyssa and the Paraphrase of St. John by Nonnus.

? Having a black beard ?. Instead of the usual compound adjective, the Greek

comes in the unremarkable form of ysvsiaSoc [xsXaivav s^ovtoc. ?Wheat-coloured in appearance, taking after his mother?. A good example

of tralatician detail. The adjective GiTO^pouc; is used to describe Mary in the spurious Narratio de Rebus Persicis (ed. Bratke, p. 17, 22: PG 10, 108A) preserved among the

writings of Julius Africanus. It is otherwise a rarity; LSJ adduce only Oppian, Cynegetica, 1, 435, and a few papyrus texts.

? Long-fingered ?. MaxpoSaxTuXo^ describes Dionysius elsewhere in Ulpius. Lam

pe gives only this reference; LSJ rely upon two passages from Aristotle. No doubt the attribute is influenced by the description of Mary as ?large of hand ? in the aforementioned Narratio. This text further depicts the Virgin as ?round faced?,

18 By E. C. Evans in a number of studies, most notably for present purposes Roman descriptions

of personal appearance in history and biography, HSCP, XLVI (1935), pp. 44-81. Compare the canons adhered to by Anna Comnena, conveniently brought together and exemplified by Buckler, Anna..., cit., pp. 57-61.

19 He may be the Adamantius several times alluded to by Oribasius; cf. E. C. Evans, Roman des

criptions ..., cit., p. 72, following R. Foerster, Script. Physiog., 1, Proleg. 100-109.

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148 B. BALDWIN

employing the compound c7TpOYYuXo7Up6o"0)7ro<;, a jaw-breaker not registered in Lam

pe. Ulpius has the word of the prophet Malachai, perhaps owing it to the physio gnomical writers cited by LSJ.

In summary, it seems fair to say the Byzantine descriptions of Christ and com

pany are comparable to those of their emperors on the one hand and their Homeric heroes on the other, thus demonstrating how their iconography, historiography, and classical scholarship are interrelated pursuits. To want to know what Jesus looked like was a natural and legitimate desire. True, ultimately no Byzantine could be sure that he had an accurate picture of Christ any more than of Achilles or Julius Caesar. The point is that at least some of them, on the iconodule as well as the icono clastic side, were willing to accept and take account of this in their contributions to the great debate.

Barry Baldwin

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