The Economic History of Byzantium From

The Industries of Art

Anthony Cutler

The Nature of the Evidence

Broadly speaking, efforts to write the history of the industries of art in Byzantium have depended on two sorts of evidence: the literary sources and, only recently, the findings of archaeology. At least as regards the history of production, which is our present concern,1 both these bodies of testimony are seriously flawed, though in different and even opposing ways: the texts, including the chroniclers and hagiographers, because neither their authors nor their audiences were much interested in the way what we call works of art came into being; at the same time the chroniclers concentrated almost exclusively on Constantinople. Even when a historian reports in some detail on a provincial monument, he typically ignores what would be useful to the economic historian. Thus Attaleiates notes the domes, columns, doors, marbles, glittering mosaics, and precious metals of the church of the Virgin built during the siege of Chandax by Nikephoros Phokas in 961,2 but says nothing of the cost or sources of these materials or of the origin or wages of those who worked them; his only quantitative datum is an improbable three days for the church’s construction. Moreover, on the rare occasion when a text provides figures for a building or an artifact, for a variety of reasons it may be unreliable. Thus the late ninthor tenth-century Story of the Construction of Hagia Sophia suggests that the huge sum of 45,200 pounds of gold was expended on the wages of its builders, even before the vaults were set in place, while its ambo alone cost 36,500 pounds of gold. We need put no faith in such numbers, for the writer’s purpose was to criticize Justinian I’s

1For the consumption of works of art, considered in a socioeconomic and cultural context, see A. Cutler, “Uses of Luxury: On the Function of Consumption and Symbolic Capital in Byzantine Culture,” in Byzance et les images: Cycle de confe´rences organise´ au muse´e du Louvre par le service culturel du 5 octobre au 7 de´cembre 1992, ed. A. Guillou and J. Durand (Paris, 1994), 287–327. Works frequently cited below include I. Andreescu-Treadgold, “The Mosaic Workshop at San Vitale,” in Mosaici a San Vitale e altri restauri: Il restauro in situ di mosaici parietali, ed. A. M. Iannucci et al. (Ravenna, 1992), 30–41; J. Koder, ed., Das Eparchenbuch Leons des Weisen (Vienna, 1991); C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972); D. Winfield, “Middle and Later Byzantine Wall Painting Methods: A Comparative Study,” DOP 22 (1968): 61–139.

2Michaelis Attaliotae Historia, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn, 1853), 228, lines 2–9.

556 ANTHONY CUTLER

prodigality and, by implication, that involved in Basil I’s Nea Ekklesia.3 Again, unlike the documents of commission that we have from other cultures, those originating in Byzantium rarely specify the cost of an acquisition. The writer Manuel Raoul’s request to the painter Gastreas for an icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God, written about 1360, offers as payment merely “the appropriate [fee].”4 Not only the prices paid for such end products but the wages of their producers and the circumstances in which they worked are normally ignored.

Byzantine field archaeology usually supplies even fewer specifics about the economic circumstances of individual artifacts. A discipline that has grown pari passu with concern for material culture, it has concentrated on things produced in quantity, for example, objects in stone, the base metals, ceramic, glass, and ordinary textiles. Such evidence, moreover, has come in the main from provincial sites, so that where the written sources tell us largely about the capital, the archaeological record tells us about what was widely made and widely used elsewhere. In other words, it focuses on commodities rather than luxuries; works of art, by any definition of the word, are largely excluded. This distinction may strike the reader as old fashioned (and even elitist), yet it receives support from the texts that we have, documents that celebrate the brilliance and rarity of materials far more often than they do the skill of the artificer, who, where he is mentioned at all in inscriptions on objects, is usually slighted.5 The value, if not the cost, of the product was seen to inhere in its physical splendor, and if anyone was considered its “producer” this was the individual who commissioned it, not the person(s) who made it. In Byzantium as in other premodern societies, the golden rule of artistic production was that he or she who had the gold set the rules.

Nonetheless, information about materials and the manner in which they were employed, about the practices of the artisans who employed them, their modes of organization, and the impact of these upon the results of their labor may be inferred from sources that are normally overlooked—the artifacts in their own right, documents that tell us more about the industries of art in Byzantium than either the written sources or the findings of archaeology. This evidence I present in diachronic sections devoted to the more important Byzantine crafts. Classification by medium may obscure the broader forces that affected artistic output. But it enables us to survey from the inside, as it were, the way in which conditions and methods of production varied in response to changing economic situations and the enduring demand for art that characterized

3On this question, see G. Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire (Paris, 1984), 285–87. Less partisan texts may on occasion provide more dependable information, particularly concerning the origin of artifacts. Thus a higher degree of probability attaches to the report of Cyril of Skythopolis (Kyrillos von Skythopolis, ed. E. Schwartz [Leipzig, 1939] 61, lines 23–24) that not only the silver urn (cw´ nh) for the ashes of St. Euthymios, but the railing around it and his tombstone had to be brought from outside, namely, from Alexandria. To this same city the neophyte Kyriakos was dispatched to buy altar cloths (aJplw´ mata) for the new koinobion at the site of Euthymios’ lavra (ibid., 226, lines 1–3). Neither account reports the cost of the merchandise in question.

4R.-J. Loenertz, “Emmanuelis Raul epistulae XII,” EEBS 26 (1956): 162.

5For two examples in ivory, see A. Cutler, The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory and Society in Byzantium (9th–11th Centuries) (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 158, 236.

this culture. Indeed, it is the very persistence of this demand that allows us to apply to Byzantium generally the role that Theodore Metochites assigned to objects of gold and silver: these, he claimed are “necessary to us, the rich and powerful, whose life is more brilliant than that of our compatriots, fellow citizens and poor people.”6

Wall Mosaics

The necessity of works in precious metal expressed by Metochites embodies a willingness to invest in expensive furnishings and an attitude toward conspicuous display that had a history as old as Byzantium itself. In this light, his decision to sheath with mosaic the interior of his church at the Chora monastery is no more surprising than the savings he achieved by limiting to fresco decoration the embellishment of the funerary chapel that he attached to this church. Both decisions rehearse millennial traditions, prompted by the sometimes competing needs of ostentation and economy.

In comparison with mural painting (see below), wall mosaic represents a major industry whether it is judged by the magnitude of the financial investment required, the many stages and the size of the labor force involved, or, at least in the fifth and sixth centuries, the vast geographical domain across which it found expression. In this last respect, its range of distribution was exceeded only by that of floor mosaic, an undertaking from which it differs radically in effect, technique, and the fineness of craftsmanship that it entailed. Unlike tessellated pavements, which had been widely used at pagan sites, wall mosaic became the medium par excellence for the adornment of monuments of the Christian faith. Supreme among surviving works is the huge body of aniconic decoration that Justinian I lavished on his rebuilding of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, an enterprise summed up in Prokopios’ observation that “the entire ceiling has been overlaid with pure gold” (De aed. 1.1.26). In contrast to floor mosaics, where the works themselves often testify to the value of individual financial contributions to the overall program and the high cost of such undertakings that can be inferred from such records,7 neither any surviving wall mosaic nor any text supplies us with information as to the cost of embellishments of this sort. Yet reasonably reliable estimates of the expense involved can be made at least in terms of the materials employed. Concerning the sixth-century mosaics of the Great Church, Marlia Mango showed that some 9,925 m2 of surface were covered with largely glass tesserae. Assuming an average 2.25 tesserae per cm2 and a thickness of 2 microns for the preciousmetal foil sandwiched in the cubes, she estimated that approximately 1,089 (Roman)

6R. Guilland, “Le palais de The´odore Me´tochite,” REG 35 (1922): 88, lines 137–40.

7E.g., for Italy, see J.-P. Caillet, L’e´verge´tisme monumental chre´tien en Italie et `a ses marges (Rome, 1993), 451–65; for Greece, the figures cited by J.-P. Sodini, “L’organisation liturgique des e´glises en Palestine et Jude´e,” The Roman and Byzantine Near East: Some Recent Archaeological Research, JRA, suppl., 14 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995), 308–10. On the relation between the size of donations and the areas of mosaic that these bought, see P. Asemakopoulou-Atsaka, “Oi dwrhte´" sti" ellhnike´" afierwmatike´" epigrafe´"

tou anatolikou´ kra´ tou" sthn o´yimh arcaio´thta,” in Armo"Ú Timhtiko´" To´mo" ston kaqhghth´ N. K. Moutsopoulo gia ta cro´nia pneumatikh´" tou prosfora´ " sto Panepisth´mio, 2 vols. (Thessalonike, 1990), 1:227–65, esp. 259–62.

558 ANTHONY CUTLER

pounds of gold were used.8 Using the same assumptions, I have suggested that in the second half of the ninth century an expanse of a little more than 2,000 m2 was sheathed with tesserae (this includes the eastern semidome as a whole, the northeastern and southeastern exedrae, and the window soffits, but not the tympana on the north and south flanks of the church), while the apse mosaic alone took almost 13 pounds of gold.9 But there the comparison between the Justinianic campaign and that of Basil I must end, for many of the ninth-century tesserae were of stone, not glass; white marble was used instead of silver; blue-gray slate instead of blue glass; and terra-cotta cubes instead of red glass. The most telling contrasts occur in the tympana, sixth-century screens into which images of the church fathers were inserted in the 880s or possibly 890s. The Justinianic parts of these surfaces are lavish, to say the least: even the backgrounds of the arch reveals—hardly the most prominent parts of the decoration— were set entirely with gold mosaic. Not a single silver-capped tessera revealed itself to close inspection.10

Yet the presence of silver may serve as a better test than gold of the relative expenditure of the mosaics’ sponsors. Its appearance is a function not of geography but of the metal’s availability. Thus, if in the first half of the sixth century the silver in the mosaics at Lythrankomi in Cyprus was mined on that island, that used in the decorations of Thessalonike and Sinai could have come from Attica, Illyria, or even Armenia. The places where silver ores were found have less to do with its employment than with the metal’s velocity in social exchange. What we do know is that in the mosaics set up after the early seventh-century fire at St. Demetrios in Thessalonike, white marble replaced silver;11 a similar substitution was made in the chapel of Pope John VII (705–707) in the Vatican.12

The absence of silver tesserae noticeable in and after the seventh century must be distinguished from the limited availability of other colors. Already at San Vitale in Ravenna, as the craftsmen moved their scaffolding in the late 540s, they ran out of some of the materials they had used in the vaults above. Thus in the western arch, for example, the portraits in the apex are made almost entirely of glass, while lower down the frequency of stone cubes increased.13 Similar compromises appear in the apse at Lythrankomi in the same period (Fig. 1). Orange-vermilion glass was replaced by tesserae that, as in the case of Bartholomew in the lowest medallion on the south side, had been pigmented before insertion into the setting bed; bright red was obtained by

8M. M. Mango in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate in Sixth-Century Byzantium, ed. S. A. Boyd and M. M. Mango (Washington, D.C., 1992), 125–26.

9A. Cutler and J. Nesbitt, L’arte bizantina e il suo pubblico (Turin, 1986), 106.

10C. Mango and E. J. W. Hawkins, “The Mosaic of St. Sophia at Istanbul: The Church Fathers in the North Tympanum,” DOP 26 (1972): 7.

11J.-M. Spieser, Thessalonique et ses monuments du IVe au VIe sie`cle (Paris, 1984), 162 n. 33.

12P.-J. Nordhagen, “The Mosaics of John VII (A.D. 705–707),” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia, Institutum Romanum Norvegiae 2 (1965): 150–52.

13Andreescu-Treadgold, “Mosaic Workshop,” 38.

3. Mosaic icon, ca. 1200, Paris, Louvre. The Transfiguration (photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux)

4. Enameled cross-reliquary, ca. 963, Limburg an-der-Lahn, Cathedral Treasury (photo: Art Resource, Inc.)

dipping marble cubes in lead tetroxide.14 At Kiti, in the southern part of the island, red, black, and yellow were all created in this way instead of the translucent glass that is found elsewhere.

Now we must not think of these ersatz colors as in any way labor saving. In fact, the pigmentation of marble would have added another step to the process by which tesserae were produced, a stage necessitated on the one hand by a shortage of glass in the forty or more hues that are found in most sixth-century programs, and on the other by the desire to maintain a broadly polychrome palette. Both the production of tesserae and their subsequent setting were highly labor intensive. Much as bank notes depend upon an original design that is passed to a die cutter, whose work is then engraved and replicated before the resulting sheets can be printed and cut up, so cubes of glass or stone were the fruits of an industry that was geared to mass production. The difference between the two processes is that some of the tesserae used for the face of the Christ child at Lythrankomi, for instance, are as small as 4 mm square. On or below the scaffold the cubes had to be sorted not only by size, but by hue (since areas of color were created additively) and by material (since glass and stone offer different degrees of luminosity). Before cubes in any material could be set, a thick bed of lime plaster had to be laid up, often in three successive renderings in order to avoid the too rapid drying of the top layer into which the tesserae would be inserted. On this layer first a general layout and then a rough sketch of the final design would be painted, sometimes in three or four colors. These would serve not only as guidelines to be observed or not as the craftsman chose, but, where glass cubes were used, as bases that could affect the perceived color. Red sinopie, for example, still visible in the interstices between cubes, worked like the red bole that often underlay and enhanced the final gilding in manuscript illumination.

Depending on the size of the tesserae, the skill of the craftsman, and the care he exercised, a mosaicist could set up to 4 m2 a day. Thus the decoration of an area like the conch of the apse of St. Sophia in Kiev has been estimated as requiring one month of labor for one man; a team of four might thus complete the task in about a week.15 Normally two mosaicists worked back-to-back on a scaffold.16 But their productivity depended, as we have seen, on that of a now-invisible industrial organization. It is no wonder, then, that mosaic decoration occurred in spurts, densely focused in terms of both space and time. In Ravenna, Julianus Argentarius’ programs at San Vitale, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, and the now-destroyed San Michele in Affricisco all went up at the same time; their mosaicists, it has been suggested,17 crossed town from one site to another, like construction workers or street pavers under contract to a modern city

14A. H. S. Megaw and E. J. W. Hawkins, The Church of Panagia Kanakaria at Lythrankomi in Cyprus: Its Mosaics and Frescoes (Washington, D.C., 1977), 133–34.

15H. Logvin, Kiev’s Hagia Sophia (Kiev, 1971), 16.

16Andreescu-Treadgold, “Mosaic Workshop,” 37.

17Ibid.