Color and Meaning in Byzantium

The aesthetics of early Christian and Byzantine art offer an area of insight into attitudes both to religion and to art, and to the place of art in religious devotion in this period. Color and the conceptual nature of color formed a key area in the definition of form in nature and art, and a means of justifying religious images as objects of devotion rather than idolatry. In a recent article, Patricia Cox Miller has shown how the aesthetics of light and brilliance in late antiquity played an intrinsic role in the transformation of human body parts into sacred Christian relics.¹ She asserts that late antique Christians were concerned to create a religio-aesthetic environment which allowed body parts to be treated as relics, and thus as spiritual and holy, rather than as idols, that is to say, material and earthly. Her aim is to show how the physical environment of relics, the buildings, and the decoration and furnishing of those buildings, with their stress on light and brilliance, served to create an intense, sensual environment that aimed to overcome the "spectre of idolatry."² Allied to the physical appearance of art, accounts of the experiences of viewing and participating in art, which we might label for convenience ekphraseis, formed a bond between the material and the spiritual, forming a bridge between the earthly and heavenly spheres which was both rhetorical and experiential.³

There was a further aesthetic linked also to light and brilliance that was equally complicit in turning earthly matter into objects for spiritual devotion. This was the aesthetic of color, which in late antiquity and Byzantium played a crucial part in the transformation not only of bones into relics but also of images into more than art, into "true images." Cox Miller's approach offers a way in to understanding something of the construction of the nature of religious art in this period and in particular, the cult of icons, for what she says of the relic, positioning it between heaven and earth, is true also of the icon.⁴ Where her interest is primarily with the fear of churchmen that believers were worshipping at tombs rather than venerating them, this concern with idolatry is also a motive force in the theology of the icon. Her emphasis on the use of aesthetic forces, both visual and oral, in dissolving materiality is one that can be applied to icons as well as to relics. Color, like light, played a double role in aesthetics and in theology.

The place of color in the aesthetics of late antiquity and Byzantium is closely allied to that of light. Light and color combine into a stress on brilliance, glitter, reflectance and polychromacity, an aesthetic apparent in writings on art throughout these periods, in genres as disparate as homilies and hymns, histories and epigrams.⁵ What mattered in art was that it should appear polychromatic, bright and gleaming. Color words, in both Greek and Latin, reflect this concern and elsewhere I have argued in some detail that we need to understand color symbolism at this time as operating with reference not to hue but to the brightness or darkness of colors.⁶ It is not surprising in light of this aesthetic that colors tend to be described in terms of their light-bearing qualities. However, as the nature of religious images became an increasing focus for argument, both color and light took on a significance beyond the "simply" aesthetic. In an epigram on an image of the Archangel Michael, the sixth-century scholar Agathias wrote that "Art can convey by colors the power of the soul."⁷ Although on one level, this can be seen simply as part of a clever epigram cast in a classicizing form, it also conveys a vital truth about the links between art, color, spirituality, and meaning, and the transformation of the object into the thing depicted in Byzantium.

The nature of the relationship between the colored image and its true and vital original is one apparent in classical philosophy. Plato objected to art because artists reproduced the appearance rather than the reality or essence of...