The Economic History of Byzantium From

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government. Another instance of such concentration is Constantinople in the 870s when Basil I commissioned inter alia mosaics in the eastern semidome, tympana, and the sekreta of Hagia Sophia, as we have seen, in the church of the Mother of God th'" phgh'",in the Holy Apostles, the Kainourgion, and the “entire ceiling” (Vita Bas. 87) of the Nea Ekklesia. A similar if smaller cluster is represented by the mosaics of the church of the basileopator Stylianos Zaoutzes and that of his prote´ge´ Antony II Kauleas, made patriarch by Leo VI, both probably built in the 890s. But it is the decorations of the 870s that I wish to stress, if only because they have occasioned commentary that concerns, or should concern, the economic historian.

Regarding the substitutions for glass of marble, slate, and terra-cotta noted above, Cyril Mango and E. J. W. Hawkins pointed to the record in “Leo Grammatikos” (i.e., Symeon Logothete) that Basil removed mosaics from Justinian I’s mausoleum at the Apostoleion and reused them in the Nea. For this step, they adduced, surely correctly, a shortage of tesserae, which they explained in general terms as due to “economic factors.”18 It may be that we can be more specific and recognize here the crunch that ensued when difficulties in the production of glass tesserae—difficulties that I have already noted in the sixth and seventh centuries—coincided with the huge demand laid on the glass factories in this decade. It may be that such difficulties are responsible for both the perennial shortage of glass cubes and the prestige that therefore attached to mosaic decoration. Valuations of this sort underlay many of the diplomatic exchanges between Byzantines and Arabs, gifts that included the forty loads of tesserae sent from Constantinople for the Great Mosque of Cordoba.19 Now, given the industrial foundation of the craft that we have observed, it makes sense to suppose that mosaicists took with them the material that they needed rather than that they found it locally.20 But the reciprocal relation between high price and high desirability could also mean that tesserae—durable goods capable of being shipped in infinitely divisible units of weight—were commodities that naturally recommended themselves to overseas merchants. To be available they had to be in actual production at the source. And such production was under way, as we know from Psellos, in the 1030s for the decoration of the Peribleptos monastery of Romanos III21 and for the same emperor’s mosaic in the south gallery of Hagia Sophia. It continued in the 1040s and 1050s for Constantine IX’s foundations of the Nea Mone on Chios and St. George in Mangana. We thus have

18Mango and Hawkins, “Church Fathers,” 22.

19As reported in the 12th century by al-Idrisi and later sources. See La ge´ographie d’Edrisi, trans. P. A. Jaubert (Paris, 1840), 2:60.

20Nonetheless, tesserae from scattered sites (Shikmona in Israel, Hosios Loukas, and San Marco in Venice) that have been analyzed suggest considerable diversity of content, possibly indicating local manufacture. The evidence is summarized by L. James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1966), 23–24. In theory, since the production of wall mosaic depends on glass and glass in turn on silicates—which are almost universally abundant in the form of sand, clay, and a host of common rocks—there is no technical reason, as opposed to reasons of economic organization, why tesserae could not have been locally produced.

21Michel Psellos, Chronographie, ed. E. Renauld, 2 vols. (Paris, 1926–28), 1:41–43.

a mid-eleventh-century constellation of monuments each of them variously attributed to imperial piety or vanity. Could international trade have had any part in this picture? As is well known from the Paterikon of the Pecherskaia Lavra, founded in Kiev shortly after 1051, icon painters from the “God-guarded city of Constantinople” haggled with Nikon, its hegoumenos, over the size of the church that they had contracted to decorate. During the dispute the painters “brought many merchants, both Greek and Abkhazi, who had traveled with them . . . and they gave away the mosaic [cubes] which they had brought for sale, and it is with them that the holy chancel is now adorned.”22

Another Kievan site, the already-mentioned cathedral of St. Sophia,23 suggests by the reservation of mosaics to its naos and the apse (much of the rest of the church was decorated with fresco) the sort of economies that would be practiced in the last great cluster of monuments to be adorned in this manner. Between ca. 1290 and ca. 1320, numerous churches on the Greek mainland and in the capital received mosaic decoration. But in the Virgin Paregoretissa at Arta it is found only in the dome, while in the Holy Apostles at Thessalonike it is confined to the upper levels of the church. So, too, in Constantinople, mosaic occurs only in the south chapel of Hagia Maria Pammakaristos, built in memory of Michael Tarchaneiotes Glabas (d. ca. 1305) by his widow. By contrast, as we have seen at Metochites’ Chora, the parekklesion was painted, whereas the vaults of the inner and outer narthexes and (presumably) the naos were encrusted with the more costly medium.

The lack of material studies of these Palaiologan programs makes it hazardous to generalize about the nature of their mosaic decoration or to relate them to the late Byzantine economy. Suffice it to say that although both goldand silver-clad tesserae are in evidence at Arta,24 at the Chora, while gold abounded, silver seems to have been eschewed entirely. On the other hand, the craftsmen at work on Metochites’ church apparently found no need to make use of cubes dipped in pigment25 as we have seen employed in sixth-century Cyprus and Ravenna, or of such substitutions as white marble for silver as in Basil I’s additions to the decoration of the Great Church. Even if the supply side of the problem of decoration in this medium could be answered, aspects of the demand for mosaic would remain entangled in such imponderables as taste, frugality, and the pretensions of the monument in the eyes of the person who paid for its adornment.

Wall Painting

Till now in our account, wall painting has appeared as the poor relation or neglected stepchild of mosaic decoration. Given that throughout the empire—whether we look at it chronologically or geographically—the covering of walls with liquid paint was far

22D. Abramovich, Kievo-Pecherskii Paterik (Kiev, 1930), 910, trans. C. Mango, Art, 222.

23On the use of imported smalt and craftsmen in this instance, see A. Poppe, “The Building of the Church of St. Sophia in Kiev,” JMedHist 7 (1981): 41–43.

24A. Orlandos, HJ Parhgori´tissa th'"“Arth" (Athens, 1963), 122–23.

25P. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, 4 vols. (New York, 1966–75), 1:183.

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more widely practiced than their adornment with hard tesserae, such neglect is surely unjustified. Moreover, poor relations may have merits concealed from or ignored by their more brilliant kinfolk. In the case of wall painting, these virtues were the relative ease with which it could be applied, and the aesthetic potential afforded by a fluid as against an intractable medium, as much as the economy that it offered to the person who wished to have a religious foundation (or, presumably, a secular habitation) decorated in this alternative manner. Certainly no later than such mid-eleventh-century undertakings as the frescoes of Hagia Sophia in Ohrid, and quite likely as early as those of Castelseprio in the ninth or tenth century, the advantages of the less expensive medium would have been apparent to patrons and to those whom they wished to impress.

We know almost nothing about the cost of the materials employed in wall paintings and even less about the remuneration of those who practiced this craft. On the rare occasion when epigraphic evidence records the amount expended on a newly built structure, it is couched in terms of the total cost of construction and painting (ajnhkwdomh´qh ke´ ajnhstwrh´qi), as in the case of the sum of donations (141⁄2 nomismata) recorded in an inscription of 1265 in a church in the Mani.26 Yet the employment of local artisans (recognizable in regional styles) as against “imported” mosaicists, the presence of a lime base (ubiquitous wherever masonry construction was practiced), and the normal use of pigments manufactured from widely available mineral and organic sources leave no doubt that mural painting represented one of the cheaper ways of adorning large spaces. Beyond the realm of immediate expenditure on material and labor, however, there are obvious similarities between this craft and mosaic decoration. Both systems covered vertical and curved surfaces; both techniques required advance preparation of areas in question. In other words, we are once again concerned with a multistage undertaking requiring scaffolding and assistants to move these temporary supports and to prepare substances that were intended to attach in would-be permanent fashion. In terms of the labor involved, this meant a hierarchy of artisans drawn up on the basis of their acquired skills; in terms of materials, the operation presupposed two or more preliminary renderings of the wall with lime plaster. The final preparatory coat often included chopped straw, an additive that enhanced the adhesion of paint. Like the plaster bed in which mosaic tesserae were set, the bonding of paint demanded a wet surface. Its drying rate—a function not only of the ambient temperature and humidity but also of the fabric of the wall to be covered—determined the pace at which the painter would have to work, a pace that in turn entailed the preparation by plastering of the surface below or beside the area on which he would work. (There is no evidence for female artists in this medium.)

If it is obvious that a full brush and a liquid medium could adorn a surface more

26 D. Feissel and A. Philippidis-Braat, “Inventaires en vue d’un recueil des inscriptions historiques de Byzance. III, Inscriptions du Pe´loponne`se,” TM 9 (1985): 312, no. 55. I am grateful to Ce´cile Morrisson for drawing my attention to this and other quantitative data cited below. Similarly, overall estimates, in which the cost of construction is not differentiated from that of decoration, are the norms in records of this sort. Best known is the figure of 26,000 solidi spent by Julianus on San Vitale (Agnellus, MGH, ScriptRerLangob, chap. 59).

easily than the additive process by which tesserae were applied, this assumption is borne out by the presence of sutures: vertical plaster joins, indicating an interval between the painter’s bursts of activity, are apparent at Hagia Sophia at Trebizond;27 horizontal seams, signaling the necessary lowering of the scaffold, are evident at knee level of the angels in the western dome of the parekklesion of the Chora.28 These sutures do not directly tell us about the speed of execution. In this latter church, Paul Underwood observed that as much as 14 m2 were painted without moving the scaffold, but this could imply merely that the framework on which the painter(s) stood was wider here than elsewhere. Still, on the basis of the evidence set out immediately below, it is reasonable to infer that wall painting teams worked swiftly: in Serbia, as surely elsewhere, they seem to have covered 6–7 m2 a day.29

Whatever their rate of progress, the physical results—evident from the scaffolds erected by conservators, not from the ground—argue for speedy, on occasion even sloppy, execution. Painters did not always smooth, let alone polish, the plaster before starting work. Except for areas of flesh, surfaces were rendered with broad strokes that rarely began or ended with absolute precision. Contours do not coincide with the colors that they were supposed to limit (Fig. 2). Areas overcharged with paint sometimes dripped on to lower zones that the painter had either already finished or did not bother to clean up afterwards.30 Then, as now, carefulness and productivity did not always march hand in hand. The result, nonetheless, was that programs of decoration were finished quickly. Smaller churches were certainly painted within a single season, that is, in the months between the last freeze of spring and the first frosts of winter. The claim in the Russian Primary Chronicle that the painting of the Dormition cathedral at Vladimir was begun in 1161 and finished on 30 August of that year is by no means incredible.31 While noting that the Russians at work in the cathedral of St. Michael in Moscow in 1344 “were unable to paint even half the church on account of its great size,” the Troitskaja Chronicle reports that the Greeks who decorated the church of the Mother of God “in the same year [that] they started also finished.”32 It is significant that we do not know if the cognomen Astrapas (“Lightning”), used by the early fourteenth-century painter Michael, was a family name or a nickname that he earned as the result of speedy work.33

Swift dispatch of a commission spelled economy for the client, increased income for its executants, or both. We have no contracts for Byzantine muralists, but it is obvious that if these artisans were paid per diem (as they were in late antique Egypt), the patron would save money. If they were paid by the job (as often in Renaissance Italy),

27Winfield, “Painting Methods,” 132 and fig. 7c.

28Underwood, Kariye Djami, 3:302, 341, and pls. 416, 420, 423.

29Winfield, “Painting Methods,” 132.

30Ibid., fig. 36.

31I. N. Dmitriev, “Zametki po tekhnike russkikh stennykh rospisei X–XII vv,” in Ezhegodnik Instituta Istorii Iskusstv (Moscow, 1954), 243, cited by Winfield, 133.

32Troitskaia Letopis’, ed. M. D. Priselkov (Moscow, 1950), 366, trans. Mango, Art, 256.

33PLP 1:1595, 3:6353; cf. 8:19057.

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the painters could move on to the next assignment. Until the grime of centuries is removed from inscriptions in rural monuments, it is not possible to track such accomplishments from year to year; for now we are largely dependent on observations based upon style, for example, that one of the painters who worked at Kurbinovo in Macedonia in 1191 had a hand in the decoration of the Anargyroi at Kastoria.34 At present, the craftsman who holds the record for “signed” acts of participation is John Pagomenos, who is known to have painted eight churches in Crete between 1313/14 and 1347.35

Progress within one building, like progress from building to building, was dependent on efficiency, born of a painter’s experience in the field, and synergy born of the on- the-job training of his assistants. In the first case, we may assume that he knew by heart the themes that he would paint and the adaptations that he would have to make as he accommodated these to such variables as the size of the monuments and the time he had at his disposal. The very normative nature of church decoration was in itself a stimulus to rapid execution. One commission might differ from another in specifying, for example, the use of gold or silver foil or expensive pigments like ultramarine (a product of lapis lazuli), but such specifications depended more on the wishes of the client and his provision of the materials in question—a responsibility with which the commissioner is charged in the Book of the Eparch36—than on the skill of the craftsman. Most often the painter worked with familiar pigments, materials that he knew would remain stable in conjunction with his plaster ground, such as azurite, the normal Byzantine blue that was produced from basic copper carbonate.

The limited number of pigments eased both the painter’s task and that of his assistant. When paints were blended, this was done in situ by an aide, not by the craftsman on the wall. Seven or eight basic pigments furnished his palette: from these were created the seventeen tones noted at Asinou as employed for garments; flesh could call for seven, hair for five, and background for seven.37 Most such blending involved lime white, the psymithi of the Hermeneia;38 black was also much used, in the proplasmos (an undercoat that could also involve dark green, yellow, and white), to darken other colors, and to trace outlines around figures. Painting was done in layers, the last one drying before the next was applied. (Azurite, for example, must be used al secco.) Final flesh pigments, black or ocher contours, and white highlights and inscriptions were added last.

So consistent were these techniques that generally, as in the case of books that lack colophons, we can distinguish only between periods and not between painters. Even

34E. N. Tsigaridas, “La peinture `a Kastoria et en Mace´doine grecque orientale vers l’anne´e 1200,” in Studenic´a et l’art byzantin autour de l’anne´e 1200, ed. V. Korac´ (Belgrade, 1988), 309–18.

35K. D. Kalokyris, “ Iwaj´ nnh" Pagwme´no" oJ buzantino`" zwgra´ fo" tou' IDaiw'no",” Kr.Cron. 12 (1958): 347–67.

36Koder, Eparchenbuch, 139, lines 789–93.

37Winfield, “Painting Methods,” 136–38.

38Dionysios of Fourna, ErmhneiJ´a th'" zwgrafikh'"´cnh",te ed. A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus (St. Petersburg, 1909), 20, 21 and passim.

when we have signatures—as we do for Michael and Eutychios in four Macedonian churches painted between ca. 1295 and 131739—“hands” are essentially interchangeable. The scarcely escapable inference is that apprentices picked up the niceties of a master’s style along with his technical recipes. The most natural, as well as the most economical, way for such training to be transmitted would be from parent to child both working on the same job, as we know happened in the mid-fourteenth century at Hagia Sophia in Ohrid, painted by Constantine and his son John.40 In the manner prescribed in the will of the icon painter Angelos Akotantos, if his son failed to learn the craft a man’s equipment might pass to his brother.41 This fortifies the notion that painters worked in family teams, an association specified in the dedicatory inscription of 1315 in the Anastasis church at Berroia, painted by Kallierges and his brother.42

No less important for artistic production were the relationships between one craft and another. Both the contemporaneity of, and the technical and stylistic identities between, the mosaics of the Chora and the paintings of its parekklesion suggest that these undertakings are due to the same artists.43 If one dismisses as circumstantial the fact that the only known parallel for Dumbarton Oaks’ (Macedonian?) icon of St. Peter, who wears his keys around his neck, occurs in the murals of the Peribleptos (now St. Clement) at Ohrid, the resemblances between the wall painting of the Chora and the St. Peter icon in the British Museum44 are not so easily disregarded. It is likely that advances in archival research and painting conservation will only strengthen our awareness of the links between crafts that till recently have been treated as distinct specialties.

Icons and Their Adornments

If the painting of icons (I use the term in its conventional sense in modern European languages) was the normal cold-weather occupation of craftsmen who in warmer months decorated churches, it stands to reason that they earned no significantly

39P. Miljkovic´-Pepek, Deloto na zografite Mihailo i Eutihij (Skopje, 1967). See also note 33 above.

40G. Subotic´, “Ohridski slikar Konstantin i njegov sen Jovan,” Zograf 5 (1974): 44–47; PLP 4: 8593, 6:14166.

41M. Manoussakas, “ HJ diaqh´kh tou' Aggej´lou Akotaj´ ntou (1436), ajgnw´ stou Krhtikou' zwgra´ fou,” Del- t.Crist. Arcj. EtJ., ser. 4, 2 (1960–61): 146–48.

42S. Pelekanides, Kallie´rgh", o”lh" Qettali´a" a“risto" zwgra´ fo" (Athens, 1973), 7–8. For other examples, see R. S. Nelson, Theodore Hagiopetrites: A Late Byzantine Scribe and Illuminator, 2 vols. (Vienna,

1991), 1:122.

¨

43 S. H. Young, “Relations between Byzantine Mosaic and Fresco Technique,” JOB 25 (1976): 269–78.

44 S. Michalarias and R. Cormack, The Icon of St. Peter by the Master of the Monastery of the Chora,

(London, 1983). An even stronger case for a craftsman at work in both media can be made when an artist’s signature is present. Thus the deacon Peter, who painted an icon of St. George at Struga in 1266, was equally responsible for frescoes at Manastir and in the church of the Holy Archangel at Varosˇ near Prilep in Macedonia. See P. Miljkovic´-Pepek, “Deux icoˆnes d’Ohrid peu ´etudie´es,” in

Byzantine East, Latin West: Art-Historical Studies in Honor of Kurt Weitzmann, ed. C. Moss and K. Kiefer (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 524–25.

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greater income in winter than they did for their efforts at other times of the year: had this not been the case, to the extent that painters were driven by economic considerations, they would have spent more time at the easel and less on the scaffold. It follows that the labor value involved in the production of an ordinary painted panel was far from high. The price of materials involved in such a panel probably added little to the size of the purchaser’s investment. Boards cut from readily available trees (pine, birch, cypress, maple, cedar) were prepared with gesso for pigments, of much the same sort as were used in fresco painting, suspended in a medium based on egg yolk. (If there is any relation between the number of examples that survive and the number that were produced, many more icons after the ninth century were made in this tempera medium than before Iconoclasm in the wax-based medium known as encaustic.) All in all, the total cost of production bears out the low valuations placed on unadorned icons in literary sources and in such documents as monastic typika, inventories, and wills.

Given that these have recently been surveyed,45 there is no necessity to rehearse this quantitative data in detail. Suffice it to point out that the value assigned to seven panels, described as “decorated” (ejgkosmhme´na) but with the nature of this adornment specified in only two cases, in an upper-class household in Thessalonike in 1384, ranges from 2 to 7 hyperpyra; in the same document a horse is said to be worth 14 hyperpyra and “a very good silk blanket” up to 32 hyperpyra.46 The relative value of these goods may also be gauged by comparing them to the total worth of possessions listed (ca. 1,000 hyperpyra) and the annual revenue of the head of this household (ca. 70–80 hyperpyra).47 Apart from the low appraisal of the panels, however, the two images described in slightly greater detail suggest those properties of an icon that, in Byzantine eyes, contributed to its material significance: one is said to be of copper, the other as being adorned with glass (meta` uJeli´ou).48 The value of neither of these objects is high (2 and 4 hyperpyra respectively), and neither is celebrated as a pretentious creation. Yet these brief characterizations imply that images made of materials other than wood, and images embellished with other substances, were more representative of what a Byzantine understood by an icon than the bare, painted boards that the term generally connotes today.49

Unfortunately, many of the documents that refer to lavishly decorated objects do not attach values to them. But pride of place in various sorts of lists provides sufficient justification for the view that richly adorned icons were esteemed more highly than undecorated specimens. The first item in the Patmos inventory, drawn up in 1200, is

45Usefully (and amusingly) by N. Oikonomides, “The Holy Icon as Asset,” DOP 45 (1991): 35–44.

46Actes de Docheiariou, ed. N. Oikonomides, Archives de l’Athos (Paris, 1984), no. 49.

47Oikonomides, “Icon as Asset,” 38.

48Actes de Docheiariou, 264, lines 25–26. It is possible that the icon said to be adorned “with glass” would, in modern terms, be recognized as having decorations in enamel and/or crystal, like the silver gilt frame with eight medallions and forty cabochons at Dumbarton Oaks (DOCat 2:154).

49It is worth noting in the Veljusa inventory of 1449 that icons not described as adorned are identified by their size. See L. Petit, “Le monaste`re de Notre-Dame de Pitie´ en Mace´doine,” IRAIK 6 (1900): 118–19. This may imply that painters were paid according to the size of panels.

a “large holy icon of John Theologos with a gilded silver border,” while the fifth piece in this catalogue is “another icon of the holy apostles Peter and Paul, entirely revetted with gilded silver.”50 It does not take much insight to see that the corollary attitude was equally true: the more richly encrusted an icon was, the more justifiable is the assumption that it was an especially revered object. This equation is spelled out by Niketas Choniates in his account of Isaac II Angelos (whom this historian elsewhere records as a despoiler of sanctuaries): “he had such faith in the Mother of God that he poured out his soul to her icons . . . overlaid [them] with gold and adorned [them] all around with precious gems and set them up as votive gifts to be venerated in those churches where the pious most often congregate.”51 Whether or not such prodigality was typical, there can be little doubt that the cult of icons as a whole stimulated considerable fi- nancial investment and generated widespread collateral activity. The frontispiece of the Hamilton Psalter in Berlin52 shows a group of aristocratic devotees in their private chapel, before an icon of the Theotokos. The image stands within a ciborium, resting on an inlaid pavement and enclosed behind an ornate grille. Each aspect of this setting would have been made to order, as would the cloth that covered the icon, the lamps that stand beside it, and the rich costumes of its adorers.

Probably the closest that we can come to the material splendor occasioned by piety are the portable mosaic icons that survive today in fewer than fifty examples. Most of these belong to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and display a technique that— in addition to our astonishment at the skill displayed in their manipulation of minute tesserae and regret at the often huge losses of material resulting from the use of wax (or wax and resin) binders—allows approximate calculations as to the means and rate of their manufacture. The Transfiguration mosaic of about 1200 in the Louvre53 measures 52 35 cm and consists of tesserae of gilded copper, marble, lapis lazuli, and colored glass (Fig. 3). Since these have an average area of 1⁄2 to 1 mm, it is evident that some 36,400 cubes were employed. If we conservatively estimate that the selection, lifting, and proper insertion of each of these elements took five seconds, we arrive at a figure of 4,800 man-hours for the production of the icon. Had the craftsman worked at this blinding task for twelve hours each day, he would have taken thirteen months to complete his task.

Of the conditions in which he worked and the cost to the client we know nothing. But the sheer duration of his labor once again suggests the diversities involved in the industries of art in Byzantium. The Life of St. Athanasios of Athos (d. 1001) indicates,

50C. Astruc, “L’inventaire dresse´ en septembre 1200 du tre´sor et de la bibliothe`que de Patmos,” TM 8 (1981): 20. For the principal documents of this genre, see ODB, s.v. “Inventory”.

51Nicetae Choniatae Historia, ed. J. L. van Dieten, 2 vols. (Berlin–New York, 1975), 1:444, lines 14–18.

52Kupferstichkab. Hamilton 78A9, fol. 39v. See H. Belting, Das illuminierte Buch in der spa¨tbyzantinischen Gesellschaft (Heidelberg, 1970), 5–6, 73 and fig. 1.

53Byzance: L’art byzantin dans les collections publiques franc¸aises, ed. J. Durand (Paris, 1992), no. 279. For the genre as a whole, see O. Demus, Die byzantinischen Mosaikikonen, vol. 1, Die grossformatigen Ikonen (Vienna, 1991).

Diataxis of Michael Attaleiates notes the presence in his monastery of an icon of St. Panteleimon painted on wood but set in a gilded silver frame with twenty-five cabochons and sixteen smaller images mounted in this peripherion.58 Ornamentation of this sort is usually thought of as characteristic of the time of Manuel Philes (d. ca. 1345), whose descriptions include many such complexities. But Attaleiates’ diataxis indicates that “ordinary” panels had metastasized into elaborate productions involving precious metals, glass, and enameling before the onset of the Komnenian era. In addition to silver-gilt (diachrysoi) icons, lamps with suspension chains, capitals for the holy doors, and other skeue, we find in this document one object that bespeaks a commerce in metalwork grown pari passu with the cult of icons: a silver triptych, displaying the Deesis and ten saints, which rested on a gilded proseuchadion. This seems to have been a sort of footstool on which sick or aged monks could kneel to make their devotions.59

No such artifact survives today, but we still have a host of precious-metal frames, covers, and haloes for the figures depicted on icons.60 Since no panel painter is known to have been the head of, or participant in, an industrial enterprise that could have turned out these ornaments, it seems likely that they were acquired from shops specializing in their production. Indeed, A. Grabar suggested that the setting of even so precious a mosaic icon as the Twelve Feasts diptych in Florence was made of prefabricated enameled plaquettes and strips of rinceaux, cut to size as need dictated.61 There is nothing inherently improbable in the notion of adornments produced en se´rie being added to luxurious unica: as we shall see below, in the tenth century the ivory plaques on numerous boxes were surrounded by decorative bone strips. Less compelling is the same author’s attempt to localize at least one group of metal decorations applied to expensive portable mosaics. Struck by the resemblance between the silver repousse´ cover and frame of an early fourteenth-century mosaic icon at Vatopedi and those of two similarly encrusted works at the same site, Grabar proposed that they were made in the monastery itself. There is no way of verifying this hypothesis, but, given both the similar figures (evangelists, apostles, church fathers) on pieces not known to have any relation with the holy mountain and Vatopedi’s well-known connections with the outside world, it must for now be taken on trust.

Metalwork

The thin and often filigreed revetments of the fourteenth century pose an obvious contrast to the numerous and weighty silver objects, of a high degree of fineness, that survive from late antiquity. For these examples of domestic plate, largitio dishes, lamp stands, patens, chalices, and so on, we possess few or no equivalents from the posticonoclastic era. Why should this be? Cultural choices—decisions regarding the func-

58P. Gautier, “La Diataxis de Michel Attaleiate,” REB 39 (1981): 91, lines 1197–99.

59Ibid., 89, lines 1177–79 with n. 7.

60The genre was surveyed by A. Grabar, Les reveˆtements en or et en argent des icoˆnes byzantines du moyen ˆage (Venice, 1975).

61Grabar, Reveˆtements, no. 31.