Byzantine Culture

History · Guide

Byzantine Sculpture

Why free-standing sculpture disappeared from Byzantine art, and what replaced it — carved capitals, marble screens, sarcophagi, steatite icons and architectural relief.

The most conspicuous fact about Byzantine sculpture is a negative one: after roughly the seventh century, the Byzantine world stopped making free-standing statues, and it never started again. A civilisation that inherited the whole technical and artistic apparatus of Greek and Roman sculpture, and that continued to admire ancient statues, collect them and write about them, simply abandoned the practice of carving figures in the round.

Understanding why is one of the more interesting problems in the field, and the answer shapes everything else. What Byzantine carvers did instead — capitals, screens, revetment, relief icons, sarcophagi — is technically superb and almost entirely architectural.

The Disappearance of the Statue

Several explanations have been offered, and the truth is probably a combination.

The association with idolatry. A statue is precisely what a pagan cult image was. Early Christian writers were hostile to the three-dimensional figure in a way they were not to painting, and the distinction hardened over time. A painted image could be defended as a likeness; a statue looked like the thing itself.

Cost and skill. Monumental sculpture requires a continuous tradition of highly trained carvers supported by steady commissions. The economic contraction of the seventh century broke that chain in most of the empire, and by the time money returned in the ninth and tenth centuries the tradition had gone.

Iconoclasm. The controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries did not create the prejudice against statues, but they sharpened the theological vocabulary around images, and the settlement that emerged permitted two-dimensional representation specifically.

Function. Byzantine religious art existed to be venerated in a liturgical setting, and the devotional object that developed was the portable painted panel. There was no role for a statue to fill.

The last datable imperial portrait statues belong to the early seventh century, and the column of Justinian in the Augustaion — a colossal bronze equestrian figure that survived until the fifteenth century and was described by visitors — was the final monument of its kind.

Byzantines went on living among ancient statues. Constantinople was full of them, collected from across the Greek world; the Hippodrome was effectively an open-air museum. A twelfth-century text, the Patria, attributes prophetic and magical properties to particular statues around the city, which suggests unease rather than indifference. Niketas Choniates’ lament for the bronzes melted down by the crusaders in 1204 is the work of a man who knew what was being destroyed.

The Capital

The single most characteristic Byzantine sculptural form is the carved capital, and the sixth century is its great period.

Classical capital orders — Corinthian above all — were reworked into new types:

The impost capital. A wedge-shaped block set above the capital proper, widening the load-bearing surface to carry an arch rather than a straight architrave. Often the impost and capital are merged into a single form.

The basket capital. The surface carved as an openwork mesh of stylised foliage, deeply undercut with a running drill so that the stone appears lacy and the ornament seems to float on shadow. The capitals of Hagia Sophia and of San Vitale in Ravenna are the best examples, and the technique — the drill doing work the chisel used to do — is the technical signature of the period.

The two-zone capital. A lower zone of foliage and an upper zone with protomes of animals or birds at the corners.

The material was almost always Proconnesian marble from the islands in the Sea of Marmara, quarried and roughed out at the quarry, shipped as semi-finished blocks, and completed on site. Quarry marks on unfinished pieces show a highly organised industry supplying the whole Mediterranean.

Screens and Church Furniture

The other major field was liturgical furniture: the templon screen separating sanctuary from nave, the ambo (pulpit), the ciborium over the altar, altar tables and window grilles.

Middle Byzantine templon screens consist of carved marble panels set between small columns supporting an architrave. The panels are typically carved in low relief with interlace, crosses, rosettes, peacocks, vine scrolls and confronted animals — ornament rather than narrative, and often deliberately flat, so that the pattern reads as a woven surface rather than as a depicted object. The later development of this screen into the tall painted iconostasis is the reason so many carved templon panels survive loose: they were dismantled when the screens were replaced.

The flattened, two-dimensional relief style of these panels is sometimes compared to contemporary Islamic and Armenian ornament, and there was certainly traffic in both directions across those frontiers.

Sarcophagi and Funerary Sculpture

Early Byzantine sarcophagi continue late Roman practice — figured scenes in high relief on the front and sides — and the type survives in quantity at Ravenna and Constantinople into the sixth century. Ravennate sarcophagi show the shift clearly: the figures become fewer, flatter and more symmetrical, and are gradually replaced by symbols, crosses, peacocks and vine scrolls.

Later Byzantine tombs were built into the wall of a church as an arcosolium, a niche under an arch with a painted image of the deceased above and a carved sarcophagus front below. The finest surviving examples are in the Chora church, where the tomb of Theodore Metochites’ family occupies a niche in the parekklesion beneath the fresco of the Anastasis.

Relief Icons and Steatite

Small-scale relief carving is where Byzantine sculpture comes closest to figurative art. Marble relief icons — usually the Virgin orans, Christ, or a military saint — were set into church walls and above doorways, and a substantial number survive.

More important is steatite: a soft grey-green soapstone, easily carved, capable of extremely fine detail, and hard enough when finished to take a polish. Steatite icons, generally between five and twenty centimetres, were produced in quantity from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, and they carry the same subjects as the ivories at a fraction of the cost. When the ivory supply failed, steatite took over.

Architectural Ornament

Byzantine buildings carry carved cornices, door frames, window surrounds and revetment borders throughout. The vocabulary is consistent: acanthus reduced to a spiky abstraction, running vine scroll, interlace, rosettes, and from the tenth century an increasing use of pseudo-Kufic bands imitating Arabic script as pure ornament — a good indication of how Byzantine craftsmen regarded the visual culture of their Islamic neighbours, treated in Byzantium and the Islamic world.

The Western Contrast

The comparison with the medieval west is instructive. Romanesque and Gothic Europe put monumental sculpture at the centre of church decoration — tympana, portal figures, capitals with narrative scenes, and from the thirteenth century free-standing statuary of great sophistication.

Byzantium put the same energy into mosaic, fresco and panel painting. Neither tradition was incapable of the other’s practice; each had decided where an image belonged. That divergence is one of the clearest markers of the point at which eastern and western Christian art stopped being versions of the same thing.

The Drill and What It Did to Stone

The technical change that defines late antique and early Byzantine carving is the running drill, and it is worth understanding because it explains why sixth-century capitals look the way they do.

A running drill is a bow- or strap-driven bit worked continuously along a line, producing a channel of deep round holes that merge into a groove. Used against foliage ornament, it hollows out the background so completely that the acanthus leaves appear to float on shadow, connected to the block only at a few points.

The effect is optical rather than sculptural. Classical carving models form by the play of light on modelled surfaces; drilled carving works by contrast between lit surface and black void, and reads at a distance in a way that finely modelled relief does not — which matters in a building forty metres high lit from a ring of windows.

The technique reaches its extreme in the basket capitals of Hagia Sophia, where the surface is a lace of undercut vine and acanthus over darkness. It was fast, it was suited to the mass production described below, and it was a genuine aesthetic choice rather than a decline in skill: the same workshops could carve naturalistic figures when asked.

The Proconnesian Industry

Byzantine architectural sculpture was a manufacturing operation, not a series of individual commissions, and the evidence for it is unusually good.

The quarries on the island of Proconnesus (Marmara Adası) in the Sea of Marmara supplied white marble across the Mediterranean. Blocks were roughed out at the quarry into recognisable capital, column, chancel-screen and ambo blanks, then shipped and finished on site.

Shipwrecks have confirmed the pattern. The Marzamemi wreck off Sicily, lost in the sixth century, was carrying a complete prefabricated church interior — columns, capitals, ambo elements and chancel screens in Proconnesian marble, destined for a basilica in the west.

Quarry marks, mason’s marks and half-finished pieces show standardised types produced to pattern. A bishop in Ravenna, Cyrenaica or southern Gaul could order a church’s worth of Constantinopolitan marble furniture and receive it ready to install — which is why sixth-century churches from Spain to Syria share the same capitals.

The Argument About Byzantine Sculpture’s Status

Whether Byzantium’s abandonment of the statue represents a loss has been argued in terms that reveal more about the arguers than the Byzantines.

The nineteenth-century judgement was straightforward: an art that cannot carve a figure in the round has declined from antiquity. This underlay the wider dismissal of Byzantine art described in Byzantine studies.

The twentieth-century reply was that the criterion is imported. Byzantine art was not attempting to represent bodies in space; it was attempting to make present a person who is elsewhere, and the flat, frontal, two-dimensional image was better suited to that. Judging it by the standard of the Parthenon frieze is like judging a liturgy by the standards of a play.

A third position, which has gained ground, is that the truth is more contingent than either. Sculptural skill did not vanish — the capitals, the relief icons and the steatites prove otherwise — and the reasons figural sculpture stopped were a mixture of cost, the collapse of the workshops in the seventh century, theological unease, and the absence of any liturgical use for a statue. Take away the last of those and the others might not have been decisive.

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