EMILE MALE ~ HELLENISTIC and SYRIAN ICONOGRAPHY

EMILE MÂLE ~ HELLENISTIC and SYRIAN ICONOGRAPHY

[Excerpted from Religious Art in France: the 12th Century by Emile Mâle, translated by Marthiel Mathews. Princeton University Press, 1978]

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A fundamental and now undeniable fact is that in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries there were two kinds of Christian art: the Christian art of the great Greek cities of the East, Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, and the Christian art of Jerusalem and the Syrian regions. Each of these had its own character, its consecrated types, its traditions. They first developed independently of each other, then drew closer, and out of their mutual borrowings, created composite types. However, for a long time, each retained something of its own distinct character, since the two strains can still be recognized in the art of the twelfth century.

The Christian art of the Greek cities of the East, insofar as we can recognize it today, bears the stamp of the Hellenic genius. Like the Greek art of the period of Alexander's successors, and by a now accepted misuse of language, it is called Hellenistic, a convenient term which has the merit of pointing to all that persists of the Greek spirit in early Christian art....

Were the art of the catacombs the subject of our study, it would not be difficult to point out the purely Greek character of a great many of its details. Jonah's whale resembles the monster of Andromeda; Noah's ark is like the singular square chest on the coins of Apamea; Christ is not dressed in the Roman toga but the Greek himation. We recognize the Greek imagination in the figure of Christ represented as an Orpheus charming the wild beasts with the harmonies of his lyre. And we recognize it above all in the figure of the Good Shepherd who, like the Hermes Criophorus, carries the lamb on his shoulders. This delightful image might illustrate an idyll of Theocritus, but in the catacombs it is bathed in another atmosphere. The graceful Greek spirit is united with the mystical poetry of the Shepherd of Hermas and the Vision of St. Perpetua. There is nothing more beguiling than this union of the beauty of Greek antiquity and the Christian genius. The faded outlines in the catacombs, which today seem to float like a dream about to vanish, have an inexpressible charm for us, for nothing conveys better a sense of the innocence, purity, and sweetness of early Christianity than these few touches of color half effaced by time.

As long as the era of persecution lasted, Christian art retained its funerary character; it became a narrative art only after the Peace of the Church. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, the narrative works devoted to the Old and New Testaments multiplied. It was then that the great Greek cities of the East were particularly creative. We do not know the paintings that must have decorated the churches of Alexandria, Antioch, and Ephesus, but the Christian sarcophagi of Rome and Arles preserve many features of Hellenistic iconography. Contrary to what was long thought, the art of sarcophagi is no more Roman than the art of the catacombs. Today we recognize in it, and rightly, the art of the Greek East. The reliefs of the sarcophagi, in fact, are often conceived like the beautiful ivories carved in the fifth and sixth centuries, almost all of which, as we now know, came from Alexandria and Antioch.... Some manuscripts with miniatures, illuminated in the sixth century or in the following centuries but copied from earlier originals, add much to what the sarcophagi and ivories teach us....

This art of the Eastern Greeks was still completely imbued with the Hellenistic spirit of antiquity. What the Greeks saw in the Gospel was its luminous rather than its sorrowful side. When they represented the Passion on sarcophagi, they showed neither the humiliation nor the suffering. The crow of thorns held above Christ's head by a soldier resembles a triumphal crown; before his judges and his torturers, Christ retains the resolute attitude of a hero of antiquity of a Stoic sage.

The Greek artists remained pagan in imagination even though they had become Christian, and continued to people the world with nymphs and gods. Beside Christ baptized by St. John, they show the god of the Jordan crowned with water leaves. After the Hebrews have crossed the Red Sea, Buthos, the genius of the deep, rises up from the depths, seizes Pharoah by the hair, and drags him down into the abyss. They give David as a companion the muse Melodia, who seems to dictate his Psalms to him; a mountain god, reclining lazily, listens to the poet's lyre while Echo shows her young face beside the fountain. They represent Isaiah standing between a goddess in a dark veil, who is Night, and a child carrying a torch, who is Dawn, This beautiful image signifies that the prophet's inspiration came at the mysterious moment when the light first begins to dispel the darkness. The figure of Night, with a blue veil sown with stars floating above her haloed head, is as magnificent as a verse of Homer. It is wonderful to find the Greeks always true to themselves.

The Homeric turn of imagination that had persisted after several centuries of Christianity gives infinite charm to the art they created, but, to tell the truth, diminishes it. The Arcadia they show us peopled with nymphs cannot be the imposing world of the Bible - those vast solitudes brushed by the shadow of God. Christian Hellenistic art did not possess the secret of grandeur. Leafing through the Vienna Genesis, a work created by the Alexandian genius, we find there a last reminder of the pleasing grace of the paintings at Herculaneum, but not the sublimity of the Bible. The Greeks has greater feeling for the New Testament; they rendered its sweetness well, but its majesty seems to have eluded them altogether.

Nothing is better proof of this than their conception of the type of Christ. The Christ of the Greeks is not a man thirty years old, but a beardless youth, almost an adolescent. The Greeks of Asia Minor and Antioch give him long hair, the Greeks of Alexandria short hair, but both endow him with the charm of youth. It is a touching conception, and shows how the Greeks imagined Christ after they had read the Gospels. For them, he was a young master whose charm was irresistible, a poet who was all beauty, eloquence and gentleness. But the majesty of God is lacking in this beautiful figure. To convey that it was not a man, the Greeks were obliged to place around his head the circular nimbus which they had sometimes given to their divinities - the nimbus they also gave to Buddha when they carved the first statues of him in India.

When the Greeks in the cities of the Near East were creating a Christian art in their own image, another art was coming into being in Jerusalem.

The discovery of the Holy Sepulcher and the True Cross in 326 must be considered as one of the great events in the history of Christianity; it was seen as a genuine miracle. Constantine immediately had magnificent monuments built on the site of the rediscovered Calvary.... They had scarcely been finished when countless pilgrims from the remotest parts of the Roman world flocked to Jerusalem. It was not enough for them to venerate the Holy Sepulcher; they visited all the places consecrated by the Gospels, and everywhere they found magnificent basilicas.... All of these buildings were decorated with mosaics. Some of the mosaics undoubtedly dated from the time of Constantine, but others could have been the work of succeeding centuries. By the end of the sixth century, in any case, the series had been completed, for we find them reproduced on the ampullae of Monza.... The Gospel scenes engraved on these ampullae reproduce the mosaics of the Palestinian basilicas.... It is through them, in fact, that we know the great Christian art of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, which differs in so many ways from the art of the Hellenistic cities....

In the sixth century, the monasteries of Mesopotamia, which has sprung up along the borders of the Christian world, practiced an art that was closely related to that of Palestine.... Throughout the East, the monks seem to have adopted the stern art of Jerusalem, already marked by the stamp of theology. The monasteries discovered several years ago in Egypt - Bawait and Saqqara - have frescoes from the sixth century that are completely Syrian in inspiration. Thus, in monastic Egypt the art of Jerusalem supplants the Hellenistic art of Alexandria....

What are the characteristics that distinguish this Syrian art from Hellenistic art?

Created in the very land where the Gospel stories had taken place, the art of Jerusalem had the ring of actuality. Christ appeared under an entirely new aspect: he was not a Greek adolescent; he was a Syrian in all the vigor of manhood, with black beard and long hair. For the first time, Christ appeared as a type of his own race; until then, he had been endowed only with grace; henceforth he was to have a masculine strength and majesty.

Hellenistic art had given the Virgin the tunic, the style of hair, and sometimes even the earrings of the great ladies of Alexandria and Antioch; the art of Jerusalem clothed her in the long veil worn by Syrian women, the maphorion, which hid her hair and lent a modest grace to he silhouette. The Virgin of the mosaics resembled the girls who climbed the steep streets of Zion. The artists of the time qive naturally gave to Christian art the Oriental color that present-day artists try to recover at the cost of so much artifice.

This sense of actuality, this local accent are always present in Syrian art. We must not forget that the art of Palestine was a commemorative art, its purpose to eternalize for numberless generations of pilgrims the events of the Gospel at the very places where they had occurred. It was an art created for pilgrims; it assimilated the recollections and even the legends that held such charm for them....

But even more striking in the art of Palestine is a sense of majesty never attained by Hellenistic art. The mosaicists of the Holy Land represented the scenes from the life of Christ with a solemnity hitherto unknown. For them, the Gospels were not just a moving story; they had already become a series of dogmas defined by the councils of the Church.... There is already something hieratic in this art.... We begin to sense in these representations of the Gospel the workings of mystical thought: an angel standing on the banks of the Jordan witnesses the baptism of Christ and unites heaven and earth. But the figure of greatest mystery and grandeur is the Virgin: she is seated full-face on a throne and holds the Child exactly at the center of her breast; the magi are at her right and the shepherds at her left. Never had a queen more majesty. Here we witness the creation of the magnificent type of sovereign Virgin who would soon reappear in the mosaics of S. Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna, in the frescoes of S. Maria Antiqua at Rome, and later, on the portals of our twelfth-century churches.... Eastern thinking was henceforth to cling to these works of superhuman grandeur: Mother of God. So this young Nazarene girl had carried in her womb one whom the world could not contain; how then was her majesty to be expressed? The Jerusalem artists imagined her as the queen of created beings, and set her on a throne.

Such are the main characteristics of Palestinian art, which contrasts so sharply with Hellenistic art.

In the sixth century, the two arts began to merge.... Only rarely did the late works created by the Greek cities remain perfectly pure. As time goes on, the increasing influence of the art of Jerusalem makes itself felt. However, the Hellenistic tradition persisted for a long time, since it can still be identified, as we shall see, in works created at the height of the Middle Ages.

[Emile Mâle then discusses the Hellenistic and Syrian formulae for all of the commonly depicted events in the Gospel, and notes instances of the survival of each formula in Romanesque art.]

Up to now, Byzantine art has scarcely been mentioned; there has been no reason to do so. In fact, we observed that our twelfth-century French works were inspired by much earlier models than Byzantine originals. All can be explained by Hellenistic or Syrian prototypes which we traced to Egypt, Syria and Cappadocia. In the Merovingian and Carolingian epochs, illuminated manuscripts had been brought from the East, and they transmitted the first Christian art to Gaul, which drew on these ancient sources until the twelfth century.

The name of Byzantine art, once evoked at every turn, must thus be used only sparingly. Now that the Eastern sources of Christian art are better known, Byzantine art appears a bit like a newcomer who garners a rich inheritance.

It is nonetheless true that from the ninth until the eleventh century, Byzantine art - the art of Constantinople - had reclothed the old models in a most noble beauty. The foundation of Byzantine art is almost always Eastern, that is, Palestinian, Syrian, or Cappadocian, but its form is Greek. It ennobled the realism of Eastern art, and sometimes it seems even to recapture the spirit of Greece.... The somewhat severe art of the Eastern monks was purified, undergoing an initiation before being given the keys to the city.

Byzantine art had its greatest and widest influence during the eleventh and twelfth centuries; it reached Russia, Italy, and Sicily.... It is not surprising that in France, at this time, certain scenes from the Gospels were known in their Byzantine form and that these new models were imitated....

France, like all Christian countries, received its iconography from the East. As true artists, our painters and sculptors instinctively felt the beauty of this inheritance handed down to them from so distant a past. They did not know that so many peoples and so many centuries had collaborated to produce it; they were not aware that the Greeks had contributed their beautiful rhythm and the Syrians their passion, but in this art of antiquity they respected a mystery almost as venerable as the mystery of dogma. For a long time they preserved these imposing forms, and it can be said that the Middle Ages never entirely renounced them.

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