Chapter 4 - Forms of Separation

Summary

In the years after the conclusion of Iconoclasm, select images were embraced in the East as being critical to the Christian narrative. This selection was part of an effort to define the Church and its position vis-à-vis the relevance and role of images. In essence, the church was protecting itself from a third wave of Iconoclasm, and one way of doing that was to formalize the way things looked and the way they would be interpreted. Certain scenes representing the twelve major feast days—including the Anastasis, the Transfiguration, the Nativity and Baptism, and Pentecost—were determined to be essential to the religious calendar and relevant to the walls of the church. Within the defined parameters of selected iconographies there was room for slight variations, but for the most part these images were showing an accountability to the Church, to the set program that had been vetted by Church authorities. In a sense, then, the religious images being produced were physical evidence of the validity of an image-based system. Art acted as a document or a certificate of proof that the battle about images had been waged and won. The stabilization of iconographies was like the creation of a new language, a visual language that was shared and repeated and, thereby, codified. By canonizing the aesthetics, all that were involved—artists, theologians, politicians—were signing on for and were part of the crafting of a culture.

While the Eastern iconographical lexicon was codified in and after the ninth century, Roman art continued to absorb inspiration from the pan-Mediterranean sphere as well as the imperial courts further West, such as imagery from the Franco-German regions. As ever, newer inspirations were inventively blended with imagery from the past, from the earlier medieval period and antiquity. The combination of the traditional and the inventive is vividly present in the apse mosaic at S. Clemente, dated to the 1120s. The vine scroll, for example, was a familiar motif in Rome and throughout the Mediterranean. Green vine scrolls were used to fill the vaults of S. Costanza (fourth century) and the conch of the chapel dedicated to Saints Cyprianus and Justina in the baptistery at the Lateran (fifth century).