Byzantine Culture

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Crusader Art and Byzantium

Latin settlers in the twelfth-century Levant commissioned art from Byzantine painters and produced a genuine hybrid. The Sinai icons, the Melisende Psalter, Bethlehem, and the influence on Italy.

The political relationship between the crusader states and Byzantium was one of mutual suspicion punctuated by open war, described in Alexios I and the First Crusade and culminating in 1204. The artistic relationship was close, continuous and productive.

Latin rulers in Jerusalem, Antioch and Cyprus commissioned Byzantine mosaicists and painters; Byzantine workshops produced icons for Latin patrons; Italian and French artists learned the Greek manner and adapted it; and the result is a body of work that is neither Byzantine nor western and that scholars have spent a century trying to classify.

Bethlehem

The clearest case of direct cooperation is the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

In the 1160s the church was redecorated in mosaic under a joint arrangement between the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos, the Latin king Amalric I of Jerusalem, and the Latin bishop of Bethlehem. An inscription names all three and the mosaicist, “Ephraim, monk, painter and mosaicist.”

The programme is bilingual — inscriptions in Greek and Latin — and combines subjects from both traditions: the councils of the church, the ancestors of Christ, angels processing toward the nave, and standard Byzantine feast scenes. It is the only surviving monumental example of a joint Byzantine-Latin commission, and the fact that it happened at all, in the reign of an emperor who was simultaneously manoeuvring to assert suzerainty over Antioch, indicates how separable art and politics could be.

Substantial parts survive and have been conserved in a major campaign completed in the last decade.

The Sinai Icons

The largest body of crusader painting is at the monastery of St Catherine on Sinai, which holds around 120 icons attributed to thirteenth-century Latin or Latin-influenced workshops.

They were identified as a group by Kurt Weitzmann in the 1960s, and they are the central evidence for the whole subject. Their characteristics:

  • Byzantine technique — egg tempera on gessoed panel with gold ground
  • Byzantine compositional types, sometimes exactly
  • Western elements in costume, armour, heraldry and physiognomy
  • Latin inscriptions, or Greek inscriptions with Latin spelling errors
  • Occasionally, western saints — Francis appears on a Sinai icon within decades of his death

Some are plainly by Greek painters working for Latin patrons; some by western painters trained in the Greek manner; some are genuinely hard to assign. The workshops are generally located in Acre, the capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem after 1191 and a cosmopolitan port with Italian, French, Greek, Syrian and Armenian communities.

The Melisende Psalter

The other showpiece is a manuscript: the psalter made in Jerusalem around 1135 for Queen Melisende, now in the British Library.

It is a compendium of the mixed culture that produced it. The ivory covers are carved with scenes of the life of David and the virtues and vices, in a style related to Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon work. The twenty-four full-page miniatures of the life of Christ are essentially Byzantine in composition and technique, signed by a painter named Basilius. The calendar is Latin, with both western and eastern saints. The decorated initials are western.

It was made in the scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre by a team working in several traditions at once, for a queen who was half Armenian and ruled a Latin kingdom over a largely Orthodox and Muslim population.

Cyprus

After Richard I took Cyprus in 1191 and sold it to the Lusignans, the island had a Latin ruling class and an Orthodox population for three centuries.

The result in art is a long, well-documented negotiation. Village churches were painted in the Byzantine manner by Greek painters throughout, and the frescoes of the Troodos mountain churches — a UNESCO world heritage group — include both purely Byzantine cycles and works with visible Italian and French elements. Donor portraits show Latin and Greek patrons in the same buildings.

Cyprus is the best place to see the encounter over the long term rather than in a single commission.

Influence on Italy

The traffic that mattered most for the history of European art ran back to Italy.

Italian painting of the thirteenth century — the maniera greca — is thoroughly Byzantine in its conventions: gold grounds, frontal figures, the Hodegetria and Eleousa types, the dark underpaint and hatched highlights of Byzantine panel technique. Cimabue, Duccio and the young Giotto learned this manner, and it was the base from which they departed.

The routes of transmission were several: Byzantine objects looted in 1204 and dispersed through Italian churches; Venetian and Pisan trading colonies in Constantinople and Acre; crusader workshops whose painters returned home; and Greek painters working in Italy.

Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna, Cimabue’s Maestà, and a substantial number of thirteenth-century Tuscan panels are unintelligible without the Byzantine icon behind them, and the point is made in Byzantine influence on the Renaissance.

The Classification Problem

What to call this material has been argued for sixty years.

“Crusader art” implies a coherent style produced by the crusader states, which overstates the case. “Levantine” or “Frankish” have been proposed. Some scholars argue the category is an artefact of Weitzmann’s classification and that the works should be assigned to Byzantine, Italian, Cypriot or Syrian workshops individually.

The argument reflects a real difficulty. The eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was a zone where Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian and Arabic-speaking Christians lived in the same cities, used the same craftsmen, and commissioned objects for use in one another’s churches. A taxonomy built on national styles does not fit it.

The Larger Point

The political narrative of Byzantium and the crusaders is a story of deepening hostility ending in catastrophe. The artistic record is a story of continuous exchange running right through the hostility, and it produced, in the Bethlehem mosaics and the best of the Sinai panels, work neither tradition could have made alone.

Both things are true at once, which is worth remembering when reading the chroniclers on either side.

The Acre Workshop

The city where most of this material was produced deserves description, because it explains the character of the work.

Acre was the capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem from 1191, after the loss of the holy city, until its fall in 1291. It was a port of perhaps forty thousand people, and it was extraordinarily mixed: Frankish nobility and clergy, Italian merchant communities from Venice, Genoa and Pisa each with their own quarter and laws, Greek Orthodox, Syriac Christians, Armenians, Jews and Muslims.

The visitor accounts describe a city of separate jurisdictions, competing churches and continuous commercial traffic with Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople and Italy.

An icon painter working there could be trained in the Greek manner, employed by a Latin patron, working from a Byzantine model, using pigments imported by Venetians, for a church whose liturgy was Latin and whose congregation was mixed. The results look exactly like that, which is why the classification is so difficult.

The Arsenal Bible, a French-language illustrated Old Testament made at Acre around 1250 for Louis IX during his crusade, is the clearest case: French text, Byzantine painting technique, and iconographic models drawn from Greek manuscripts.

When Acre fell in 1291 the workshops dispersed, principally to Cyprus, which is why the Cypriot material of the fourteenth century continues the same mixture.

Icons for Two Rites

Some of the Sinai panels reveal their intended audience in details that are easy to miss.

Saints. A Byzantine icon carries Byzantine saints. Panels showing Francis of Assisi, Martin, Nicholas in a western bishop’s mitre rather than an Orthodox omophorion, or a Latin saint in a Greek compositional type, were made for Latin viewers.

Inscriptions. Latin lettering; or Greek with spelling errors that a Greek speaker would not make; or both languages on one panel.

The Crucifixion. The Byzantine convention shows Christ’s feet side by side, each with its own nail. The western convention from the thirteenth century crosses the feet and uses a single nail. Panels with crossed feet in an otherwise Byzantine composition are a marker.

Heraldry and armour. Military saints in western mail and surcoats, with shields bearing arms, rather than in Byzantine lamellar.

Donor figures kneeling in western fashion rather than standing in the Byzantine manner.

The combination that recurs — Byzantine technique, Byzantine composition, western details of dress, saint and inscription — is what defines the group, and it demonstrates that the boundary between the traditions was a place where people worked rather than a wall.

The Maniera Greca and Its Overthrow

The Italian debt to Byzantium, and the moment Italian painting broke with it, is the transmission’s most consequential result.

Thirteenth-century Italy painted in the maniera greca: gold ground, frontal hieratic figures, the Hodegetria and Eleousa types, the dark-to-light flesh modelling of Byzantine panel technique, and compositions taken directly from Greek models.

The chain is visible in the pictures. Coppo di Marcovaldo, Berlinghiero, Cimabue and the young Duccio are painting Byzantine icons in Italy. Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna of 1285 is a Byzantine Hodegetria, enlarged and elaborated.

Then it changes. Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua (c. 1305) put weighted bodies in describable space, with figures who turn away from the viewer, who occupy architecture that has depth, and whose emotion is carried by posture rather than by convention.

Vasari, writing in the sixteenth century, framed this as a liberation: Giotto rescued painting from the “clumsy Greek manner.” That framing has shaped western art history ever since and is unfair in both directions — it undervalues what Byzantine painting was attempting, and it obscures how much Giotto took from what he was leaving.

The fairer account is that Italian painters spent a century learning technique, composition and the depiction of sacred narrative from Byzantine models, and then asked a different question of it. The relationship is traced further in Byzantine influence on the Renaissance.

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