THE SPREAD OF STYLE IN THE EMPIRE
THE BYZANTINE STYLE:
Insight into spiritual Byzantine art requires an understanding of the liturgical significance of its different forms, colors, and gestures. The purpose of church art in the Eastern Roman Empire was spiritual and symbolic, and its essence was in its content rather than its form.
The Byzantine style separated itself from the early Constanian style, like that of Santa Pundenziana, by its use of icons. The images of Jesus Christ, the apostles, saints, and martyrs were meant "to inspire, to guide, and to encourage the faithful"[1].
The church and state were inseparable in the East, and religious motives coincided with imperial motives in church propaganda. The East wrestled with two periods of Iconoclasm that would ultimately destroy the majority of its mosaics, while the West remained firmly in support of the icon. Many of the artists in the East migrated and brought the Byzantine style with them. Due to this spread, we can gain insight into the Byzantine style and its adaptation throughout the Empire by looking at the development of the apse in the Latin West.
THE APSE IN EARLY MEDIEVAL ROME:
The combination of iconographic and epigraphic features in the series of mosaics commissioned by the popes in the sixth through the ninth centuries sets apart the early medieval apse in Rome.
While the hierarchy of heavenly figures goes back to early apse design, the Romans distinguished themselves with their choice of figures within the celestial order. While all basilicas represented her dedicatee, the Romans often introduced other saints to serve as temporal bridges uniting the church into one body in heaven and earth. Almost all of the mosaics during the period focused on the saints martyred during the Christian persecutions in the second and third centuries.
They also introduced the figure of the living pope as the patron offering up the Church to God. The inscriptions, also a traditional attribute, became particularly uniform in content and appearance. They brought together visual displays of light and material as well as verbal content to underlie the figures in the mosaic.
All of these characteristics intertwined to significate the divine and to serve as papal promotion. Erik Thunø, the Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University, studied the series of mosaics and contends that they function on both a vertical and horizontal axis.
The series of mosaics is strictly horizontal; they serve as "equal referents to each other and produce a meaning that reaches beyond each individual artifact"[2]. The mosaics also serve as the vertical link between heaven and earth, and together this interlinked network between the mosaics joins the viewer with the divine.
[1] Nicholas N. Patricios, The Sacred Architecture of Byzantium: Art, Liturgy and Symbolism in Early
[2] Erik, Thunø, The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome: Time, Network, and Repetition (N.Y, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 12.