7 Second Rome or seat of savagery? he case of Byzantium in nineteenthcentury European imaginaries Maria Taroutina I n their critical essay on the ‘Primitive’, Mark Antlif and Patricia Leighten assert that we should think about this concept ‘above all ... as the product of the historical experience of the West and more speciically as an ideological construct of colonial conquest and exploitation’.1 Indeed, as discussed elsewhere in the present volume, the hypothetical gulf between the primitive and its direct antithesis, the civilised, was strategically employed by European nations as a historical justiication for their territorial and political domination over much of the rest of the world throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the assumed stability and consistency of this binary opposition belies a much more complex and contested reality. Who and what was ‘civilised’ tended to shift and change, depending on the geo-political stakes and the conlicting regional ambitions of the Great Powers. hus, for example, in the space of only a few decades, the Russian understanding of China and Japan as sophisticated and civilised cultures was rapidly replaced by denunciations of barbarism and savagery as Chinese and Japanese expansionist aspirations began to loom large over the Sino-Russian border at the turn of the century.2 Such dramatic reversals in attitude were equally manifest in relation to past civilisations as well as present ones. A particularly instructive example is the case of the Byzantine Empire. Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, interest in this ancient civilisation increasingly relected the competing territorial claims of the diferent European nations, as well as their broader nationalist, political, and imperialist agendas. As Paul Stephenson argues, it is impossible to understand the Byzantine Revival without examining the tensions and contradictions inherent in the ‘Eastern Question’.3 Accordingly, in the second half of the nineteenth century, several conlicting images of Byzantium emerged within the broader European imaginary. On the one hand, Byzantium was represented as a decrepit, despotic, Oriental and above all savage milieu; while on the other, it was re-staged as a sophisticated, ancient civilisation, the guardian of a pure, uncorrupted Christianity and the true descendant of Greek culture. Unlike the Enlightenment understanding of civilisation as a single, teleological process through which all societies must pass, nineteenth-century attitudes towards Byzantium relect the proliferation of multiple and often conlicting deinitions of civilisation, shaped by MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 150 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, he Empress heodora at the Coliseum, 1889, oil on canvas, 157.48 × 133.35 cm, private collection. 151 7.1 either inclusive or exclusionary political agendas. Consequently, this chapter postulates that in the second half of the nineteenth century notions of the civilised and the primitive were often much more luid and heterogeneous than is implied by the rigid East/West, Self/Other, Civilised/Primitive dichotomy theorised by subsequent post-colonial discourse. A brief comparison between two contemporary paintings on the subject of Byzantine court life – one by a French artist and the other by a Russian one – clearly illustrates this point.4 In their striking formal, thematic, and conceptual diferences these works articulate two entirely antithetical visions of medieval Byzantium. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 151 11/05/2016 19:25 152 7.2 civilisation and nineteenth-century art Vasilii Smirnov, he Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889, oil on canvas, 95 × 98 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. In Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant’s painting, he Empress heodora at the Coliseum (1889; Figure 7.1), the Byzantine ruler is portrayed as a decadent, lethargic princess, who relishes a barbaric form of entertainment. In the middle-ground on the right-hand side of the painting, a tiger crouches over two prostrate and motionless human bodies. his tragic fate was typically reserved for Christian martyrs in Ancient Rome in the early days of Christianity. However, in the sixth century, by the time that Justinian and heodora were in power, a scene such as this one would have been impossible. At best, heodora might have attended chariot races at the Constantinopolitan Hippodrome, but both gladiatorial combat and animal ights had been banned during the reign of Constantine I, who considered them to be vestiges of paganism and at odds with Christian doctrine. And yet, in BenjaminConstant’s painting, the uncivilised practices of what was often understood to be a civilised and sophisticated culture – Ancient Rome – were conveniently displaced onto Byzantium, which had become a plausible setting for such barbaric rituals. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 152 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? Vasilii Smirnov, he Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889, detail. 153 7.3 he visual rhetoric of the painting further emphasises its narrative import. For example, the swirling, scarlet fabric behind the Empress and the predominantly red palette of the work underscore the bloody scene unfolding in the arena, and heodora’s composed and relaxed demeanour reveal her cruel, wanton nature as she remains indiferent to the human misery before her eyes. A triumph of glossy art pompier, Benjamin-Constant’s painting draws heavily on all the standard tropes of Orientalist painting. he eroticised, semi-reclining heodora, surrounded by St. Lawrence, 5th century, mosaic, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, interior, Ravenna, Italy. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 153 7.4 11/05/2016 19:25 154 7.5 civilisation and nineteenth-century art Vasilii Smirnov, he Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889, detail. vibrant colours, opulent furs and sumptuous fabrics, is reminiscent of the popular depictions of harem scenes and odalisques. he wide range of deep, rich hues of vermilion, auburn, ochre, russet, and shimmering gold produce a visual feast of colour. Meanwhile, the luxurious textures of the marble column, velvet draperies, fur blanket, and heodora’s silk garments all generate a seductive tactility that is further augmented by the soft, smooth, serpentine igure of the Empress, whose silky, peach skin is ofset with iridescent jewels. In this painting, decadence meets barbarism, tantalising the viewer both thematically and stylistically. Eschewing all historical accuracy, Benjamin-Constant produced an image based on pure fantasy: a distant and foreign milieu of unbridled luxury, savagery, and vice. Conversely, in Vasilii Smirnov’s he Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors (1889; Figure 7.2), the Byzantine Empress is portrayed as a virtuous and humble ruler. She begins her day by honouring her ancestors, and her court is a place of order, restraint, and respect for tradition. Unlike Benjamin-Constant, Smirnov set his scene in an actual early Christian monument, 7.6 St. Peter and St. Paul, 5th century, mosaic, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, interior, Ravenna, Italy. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 154 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 155 the ifth-century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. Given the nature of the Empress’s visit, it is only logical that the action should take place in a wellknown, ancient mausoleum. However, as I have argued elsewhere, an examination of the spatial layout and decoration of the mausoleum indicates that Smirnov went to great lengths to achieve archaeological accuracy in his painting.5 During his three-year stay in Italy from 1884 to 1887, the artist had made numerous studies and sketches of Byzantine art and architecture, which he then used to inform the iconography in this painting.6 For example, in the lunette immediately above the heads of the Byzantine courtiers, we recognise the image of St Lawrence from the Galla Placidia, who is depicted standing next to the burning gridiron on which he was martyred (Figures 7.3 and 7.4). Above him, we see the feet of two apostles and two white doves next to the fountain of life. hese images are almost exact copies of the original Byzantine mosaics on the walls of the Galla Placidia. Smirnov even went so far as to painstakingly reproduce the individual mosaic tesserae in oil paint in order to achieve complete verisimilitude (Figures 7.5 and 7.6). Vasilii Smirnov, he Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889, detail. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 155 7.7 11/05/2016 19:25 156 civilisation and nineteenth-century art heodora and Her Court, AD 547, mosaic, Church of San Vitale, interior, Ravenna, Italy, detail. 7.8 he Byzantine courtiers in Smirnov’s painting also radically depart from Benjamin-Constant’s heodora. Depicted standing, in long robes and with reverently bowed heads, these solemn, deferential igures are a far cry from the languid, lounging heodora. he Empress herself is dressed in a regal, maroon mantle with an embroidered, golden hem that Smirnov had copied directly from the sixthcentury Byzantine mosaic of the Empress heodora in the Ravenna Church of San Vitale (Figures 7.7 and 7.8). Although the Empress is not named in Smirnov’s title, the fact that she is portrayed in heodora’s robes implies that her identity is indeed that of the famous Byzantine Empress. In addition, the jewellery, colours, and patterns on the garments worn by her attendants also closely resemble those of the courtiers in the San Vitale mosaic, again conirming her identity as heodora. he Byzantium that emerges from Smirnov’s image is neither barbaric nor decadent, but an ancient civilisation with its own particular customs, traditions, and culture, all of which are intended to be seen as worthy of respect and admira- MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 156 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 157 tion. Instead of the imaginary, seductive, and fantastical evocation of BenjaminConstant’s work, Smirnov’s painting is characterised by an attempt to achieve painstaking archaeological accuracy and a Realist commitment to reconstructing a plausible historical scene. Although it is easy to dismiss these striking pictorial diferences as the logical result of the disparate temperaments, styles, and artistic goals of the individual artists, I would like to posit that they are, in fact, products of a broader cultural politics, wherein the ‘Byzantine’ was alternatively constructed to signify either the modern or pre-modern, the self or the other, the civilised or uncivilised, depending on the immediate ideological, religious, and political exigencies of a given context. hroughout the Enlightenment period, Byzantium was famously disparaged by the most prominent thinkers of the age, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and Hegel. In what have now become a string of often-quoted, iconic epithets of unmitigated disdain,7 Byzantium was variously labelled as ‘a disgrace for the human mind’,8 a ‘disgusting picture of imbecility’,9 and ‘a worthless collection of orations and miracles’.10 Above all, it was seen as a savage, Asiatic despotism that had entirely lain to waste any remnants of Greek and Roman civilisation, leaving posterity nothing worthy of admiration or emulation. In 1812, the Romantic poet Percy Shelley lamented that in the Galla Placidia: he tombs are massy cases of marble adorned with rude and tasteless sculpture of lambs, and other Christian emblems with scarcely a trace of the antique. It seems to have been one of the irst efects of the Christian religion to destroy the power of producing beauty in art. hese tombs are placed in a sort of vaulted chamber, wrought over with rude mosaic.11 If the ultimate marker of a culture’s sophistication and level of civilisation was the art and architecture that it had produced, then Byzantium had only attained a ‘rude’ and ‘primitive’ stage of development. Describing Constantinople’s most celebrated architectural monument, the Hagia Sophia, the prominent British historian Edward Gibbon expressed nothing but contempt: ‘the eye of the spectator is disappointed by an irregular prospect of half domes and shelving roofs … destitute of simplicity and magniicence … how dull is the artiice, how insigniicant is the labour’.12 Gibbon’s highly inluential History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from 1776 remained the authoritative work on Byzantium for several decades and continued to shape public opinion across Europe well into the nineteenth century. So much so that in 1829 the Russian philosopher Piotr Chaadaev blamed all of Russia’s political and historical ills on its Byzantine heritage. He lamented: Obedient to our fatal destiny, we turned to the miserable, corrupt Byzantium, ostracised by all peoples, for a moral code on which to base our education … Isolated by a fate unknown to the universal development of humanity, we have absorbed none of mankind’s ideas of traditional transmission.13 Nearly two decades later, Alexander Herzen continued to express a similarly negative view of Byzantium: MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 157 11/05/2016 19:25 158 civilisation and nineteenth-century art Ancient Greece had lived out her life when the Roman Empire covered and preserved her as the lava and ashes of volcano preserved Pompeii and Herculaneum. he Byzantine period raised the coin lid, and the dead remained dead, controlled by priests and monks as every tomb is, administered by eunuchs who were perfectly in place as representatives of barrenness.14 As these critiques indicate, up until the mid nineteenth century, Rome rather than Byzantium was believed to have inherited and transmitted to contemporary Europe the philosophical, literary, and artistic culture of Ancient Greece. In fact, the very idea that Byzantium represented a ‘decline’ or disintegration – rather than a transformation – of Roman civilisation, implied that it never managed to evolve or attain an advanced level of civilisation, but instead persisted in a state of stunted and primitive development for most of its history. Even in his sympathetic 1853 account of Veneto-Byzantine architecture in the Stones of Venice, John Ruskin repeatedly contrasted ‘the naiveté of barbaric Christianity’15 to later Renaissance sophistication, praising Byzantine art as ‘rude’ but honest in its premodern simplicity. Instead of considering Byzantium as part of the broader European heritage, Ruskin – like Herzen and Chaadaev – saw it as being outside of the shared experience of Western civilisation, attributing the Byzantine use of polychromy in architecture to a timeless ‘Oriental’ impulse.16 Similarly, in A History of Architecture, British art historian Edward Freeman observed that: As a form of art, Byzantium cannot claim a place equal to those of Western Europe. We have not to deal with Greeks or Romans, Celts or Teutons … It is a character ixed, staid, and immutable; it is not Persian or Arabian, not even Caucasian or Mongolian; it is not ancient, modern, or mediaeval; but, a term of all ages and races, it is Oriental.17 he notion of Byzantine art as ‘immutable’ persisted throughout the nineteenth century, and in his discussion of Byzantine architecture, Freeman observed that despite the multiple architectural ‘mutations’ that one would expect to take place in a span of ‘fourteen centuries … even in the East’, Byzantine monuments had scarcely changed from their ifth and sixth-century variants.18 In fact, he concluded that ‘the structures reared to this day by the Mahometans in India exhibit far less deviation from the type of St. Sophia, than exists between the Basilica of Clement and the Cathedral of Sarum’.19 According to this account, unlike the gradual evolution of diferent stylistic schools in the trajectory of Western European architecture, Byzantine designs were primarily characterised by stasis. hese ideas were still further reinforced by the publication of AdolpheNapoleon Didron’s and Paul Durand’s Painter’s Manual of Dionysius of Fourna in 1845.20 During their travels in Greece in 1839, the two men came across an artist’s manual at a monastery in Mount Athos, which provided detailed instructions on how to depict various religious igures, scenes, and inscriptions.21 his discovery seemed to explain how and why the same iconographic and stylistic formulae were reused in Byzantine art over the span of several centuries, without apparent innovation, leading Didron to conclude that: MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 158 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 159 he Greek artist is enslaved to traditions as the animal to its instinct. He makes a igure as a swallow its nest or a bee its hive. he Greek painter is the master of his execution; the art is his, but the art alone, because the invention and the idea belong to the fathers, the theologians of the Catholic Church.22 While Western European art continually evolved under the inluence of wellknown and easily recognisable ‘masters’, in the Byzantine case it appeared that anonymous ‘craftsmen’ had mindlessly reproduced copy after copy since the times of Justinian, leading many to conclude that Byzantine art was incapable of transformation or evolution. he analogy with animals and birds is especially apt, since discourse on civilisation and its opposites has tended to position nature as the antithesis of culture, and instinct as the contrary of intellect. he Byzantine artist was thus understood to create his art without recourse to the mind, the imagination or an advanced theory of aesthetics. Consequently, akin to other primitive cultures, Byzantium was thought to persist through time unchanged and unchanging, remaining largely outside of historical periodisation. In his Poetry of Christian Art, Alexis Francois Rio claimed that the only time in history that Byzantium came into direct contact with the Western artistic tradition it had ‘exercised a most pernicious inluence on art in Italy. he conquest of this unhappy country under Justinian, far more fatal in its consequences than that of the Goths, interrupted for a time the ancient traditions, which were afterwards slowly and with diiculty revived.’23 Byzantine art and architecture were thus seen as an ‘interruption’ or a ‘regress’ in the general march of Western civilisation. Although advances in Byzantine archaeology and scholarship in the 1870s and 1880s had led to a growing appreciation of Byzantine art and architecture among small groups of connoisseurs, scholars, avant-garde artists and architects, the British and French publics still largely continued to view Byzantium as the distant, primitive, and barbaric ancestor of the contemporary Ottoman Empire.24 Moreover, despite the appearance of several notable French and British publications on Byzantine art during this period – such as Charles Bayet’s L’Art Byzantin (1883) and William Lethaby’s he Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building (1894) – France and Britain tended to lag behind Russia and Germany in institutionalising Byzantine studies as a serious discipline.25 In fact, as late as 1870, the historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky still echoed the Enlightenment critiques of Voltaire and Montesquieu, writing that the Byzantine Empire constituted ‘without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed … absolutely destitute of all the forms and elements of greatness’.26 It was precisely this vision of Byzantium that was recreated for mass audiences in England and France in the closing decades of the nineteenth century by Victorien Sardou’s renowned play héodora. First staged in 1884, the play featured Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role as the Byzantine Empress and ran consecutively for 257 performances, attracting huge audiences and receiving widespread press coverage in France, England, and America.27 As Elena Boeck has made clear, the play actively participated in both academic and popular discourses alike because of Sardou’s reputation as a ‘scholar and intellec- MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 159 11/05/2016 19:25 7.9 William Downey, Sarah Bernhardt as héodora, 1884, albumen and silver print, 10803.h.9, vol. I, pl. 3, British Library, London. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 160 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 161 tual’, bolstered by his insistent claims to ‘archaeological verity, thorough knowledge of scholarship and exhaustive research’.28 In Sardou’s reconstitution, Byzantium emerged as a decadent, Oriental, and barbaric Empire, where ‘the Byzantine protagonists are as ignoble as their taste’.29 What is especially notable is the telling conlation between ancient Byzantium and the contemporary Ottoman Empire. hus, for example, in surviving images of the sets, the Hagia Sophia is already depicted as an Ottoman mosque with two prominently visible minarets.30 Similarly, Bernhardt’s various costumes evoked the exotic and the East with their elaborate embroidery, bright colours, and rich ornamentation (Figure 7.9). One reviewer described one of Bernhardt’s costumes in the following terms: Necklace after necklace was hung upon her shoulders, and then a band and pendants about her waist and on her arms, and then a splendid jewelled head-dress, that contained some magniicent precious stones of real and rare Persian workmanship. On either side of the centre ornament, in front of the head-dress, were two jewelled medallions of most exquisite Persian design ...31 As these repeated references to ‘Persian’ design demonstrate, the public tended to associate Byzantium with the contemporary Middle East, and Sardou’s héodora was largely understood to be a beautiful and decadent femme fatale rather than a Christian queen. hus, for example, Marius Mars-Vallet’s sculpture of Sarah Bernhardt as héodora from 1900 (Figure 7.10) portrays the actress in a large turban and with prominently bared breasts, as in Salon depictions of harem women and odalisques. In addition, heodora’s seductive posture and the large, lat, centrally-placed spherical ornament on her dress formally recall the silver platter of Salomé. Accordingly, despite Sardou’s claims to historical accuracy, the image of héodora perpetuated by the play had much more in common with in-de-siècle depictions of Salomé and Cleopatra than with any archaeological vestige of the Byzantine Empress. Marius Mars-Vallet, Sarah Bernhardt as heodora, 1900, bronze with multicolored polychrome patinas, 33 × 17.8 × 10.16 cm, Jennmaur Gallery, San Francisco, CA. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 161 7.10 11/05/2016 19:25 162 civilisation and nineteenth-century art As with Benjamin-Constant’s heodora at the Coliseum, Sardou’s portrayal of the Byzantine Empress betrayed the distinct contradiction inherent in the Orientalist genre: a concomitant rejection of and desire for the ‘Other’. Although commentators on the play repeatedly denigrated the Byzantines as ignoble savages, they simultaneously delighted in the luxurious splendour and opulence – the ‘exquisite Persian design’ – of this imaginary Byzantine world. Sardou’s Orientalising restaging of Byzantium as a primarily foreign and alien culture allowed Western European audiences to pass judgement on the immoral behaviour of its Byzantine protagonists, while simultaneously indulging their senses in the rich, unbridled sensuality that Byzantium ofered. In other words, British and French viewers could discreetly delectate the visual sumptuousness of Byzantine decadence and depravity from the safe position of their stable, self-righteous Occidentalism. Although seemingly inconsequential, such popular misconceptions of the Byzantine Empire served to advance the broader political and ideological goals of the British and French governments. With the ‘Eastern Question’ looming large over the European horizon throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Britain and France were anxious to reinforce the Ottoman Empire’s territorial integrity against Russian incursions by claiming historical and cultural continuity between it and Byzantium. By the same token, such ideological continuities also seemed to simultaneously justify the British and French ‘civilising mission’ in the region. In 1915, the British diplomat, Sir George Young, wrote that: he failure of the Turks is due to Byzantinism … heir corruption and impotence were inherited with their national capital … No democracy, no simple virtues, and no sound vitality could grow in such soil ... he decadence of the Turk dates from the day when Constantinople was taken and not destroyed.32 In other words, Ottoman corruption and incompetence – inherited directly from Byzantium – necessitated British and French involvement in its afairs as guarantors of its territorial cohesion. By contrast, an entirely diferent picture of Byzantium emerged in Germany and Russia.33 hese countries also sought greater political inluence in the Balkans, although by other means. Unlike the civilising mission of France and Britain, theirs was a historical justiication, especially in Russia’s case. By claiming continuity with the once powerful Byzantine Empire, Russia sought to undermine British and French ambitions in the region; and, by the close of the nineteenth century, Russia had carried out a series of military campaigns against the Ottoman Empire in an attempt to gain direct control over its territories.34 Conversely, Germany pursued indirect political and economic domination over the region as a way of augmenting its status as a Great Power and an imperial presence.35 Accordingly, in both countries, the Byzantine mode was used to signify political stability, economic prosperity, and imperial objectives. hus, for example, Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia turned to Byzantine iconography and style as a means of symbolically reinforcing his political prestige both in his own country and in Europe more broadly.36 As Robert S. Nelson has MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 162 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 163 persuasively argued, Friedrich Wilhelm’s revivalist Byzantine and early Christian projects, such as the Friedenskirche in Potsdam, were meant to re-invent tradition for the young monarchy, especially in the wake of the 1848 revolutionary threat: Friedrich Wilhelm … had a justiied fear of the liberal forces spawned by the French Revolution. His solution for Prussia was to create a conservative countermovement, a new fusion of state and church by appealing to medieval traditions. One model in this regard was Constantine the Great, who had made Christianity a state religion, infused it with the grandeur of the imperial cult, and founded some of the early Christian churches that so attracted the king …37 In Friedrich’s conception, then, Byzantium was neither primitive nor barbaric but a digniied, ancient civilisation worthy of imitation both politically and aesthetically. Moreover, Friedrich believed that a return to the principles of early Christianity would help to reverse the ‘unbelief ’ (unglaube) and ‘indiference’ (gleichgültigkeit) of his own age, and he advocated reform of the German Church through an espousal of early Christian liturgy and architecture.38 For the Prussian monarch, Byzantine austerity symbolised a pure and uncorrupted Christianity, and he therefore considered it to be ‘the most appropriate architectural expression of his determination to build a “Christian state” in Prussia as a bulwark against the revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century’.39 As a result, in addition to the Byzantinising Heilandskirche and Klosterhof complex, Friedrich had a twelfth-century Byzantine mosaic removed from its original location in the San Cipriano Church in Murano, Venice, transported to Prussia and installed in his palace chapel in Potsdam, the Friedenskirche or Church of Peace (Figure 7.11).40 he mosaic depicts the Christ Pantocrator, or Christ in Judgement, holding the Book of Life in his left hand. He is lanked on both sides by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. Next to them stand the apostle Peter and Saint Cyprian, and the archangels Raphael and Michael. In the centre there is an image of the Holy Lamb and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, descending from heaven. According to Gerd H. Zuchold, the Friedenskirche ‘was supposed to symbolise that state’s very essence, while the Murano mosaic itself evoked Friedrich Wilhelm’s notion of his own ordination through the grace of God’.41 David Barclay makes a similar argument, implying that Friedrich Wilhelm’s choice of imagery, medium, and location for this important architectural project was not merely a matter of aesthetic preference, but was instead the ‘programmatic expression, in stone and glass, of Frederick William IV’s vision of monarchy, of the essence of the Prussian state, and of himself as Primas of German Protestantism’.42 In other words, the Byzantine mode was deployed in order to reassert the Prussian monarch’s Divine Right to rule. Instead of being seen as a primitive despotism, Byzantium was championed by Friedrich Wilhelm as a positive example of successful theocracy. Similarly, Ludwig II of Bavaria was equally drawn to the majesty and grandeur of the Byzantine Empire. So much so, that in 1869 he commissioned his hrone Room in the Neuschwanstein Castle to be executed in an elaborate Neo-Byzantine style (Figure 7.12).43 he king insisted that the architects and artists should draw MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 163 11/05/2016 19:25 164 7.11 civilisation and nineteenth-century art Christ Pantokrator Mosaic, c. 1200–1300, originally from St Cipriano Murano, but now in Friedenskirche in Potsdam, Germany. their inspiration from the Hagia Sophia, instructing his court secretary, Lorenz von Dulipp, to ensure that there should be ‘all the types of marble which the architect Salzenberg lists in describing the Church of St. Sophia in Constantinople’ and that the throne must be ‘covered by a canopy which rests on columns, similar to the altar in St. Sophia’s Church’.44 he hrone Room was constructed between 1879 and 1887 and measured some 240 square meters in its inal form. he lavish materials, iconography, and structure of the hrone Room were all meant to create an explicitly sacred atmosphere, articulating Ludwig II’s belief in the Divine Right of Kings, much like his Prussian counterpart. Accordingly, the walls and ceiling were decorated with predominantly religious scenes, executed on a gold background, as was typical of Byzantine aesthetics. Dominated by a central dome, the hrone Room is lined with a series of intricately decorated, gilded arches, supported by vibrant blue and purple columns, which were meant to imitate lapis lazuli and porphyry.45 he centre of the hrone Room was supposed to be adorned with a large chandelier, modelled after a Byzantine crown, and made of gilded brass set with pieces of coloured Bohemian glass, which were intended to resemble precious stones.46 Originally, Ludwig had also envisioned a large painting devoted to Justinian as a central piece in the hrone Room, but this was never realised. Like Friedrich Wilhelm, Ludwig did not conceive of Byzantium as a primitive or barbaric milieu, but rather as the irst fully Christian Empire and successful theocracy – one to be admired and emulated by modern nations. Accordingly, the apse of the hrone Room was decorated with a nineteenthcentury variation on the Diesis (as was typical of Byzantine iconography) intentionally positioned directly above where the King’s throne was intended to stand. In MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 164 11/05/2016 19:25 he Apse of the hrone Room, Neuschwanstein Castle, 1885–86, Bavaria, Germany. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 165 7.12 11/05/2016 19:25 166 civilisation and nineteenth-century art this image, Christ appears enthroned and holding the Book of Life in his left hand with the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist standing on either side of Him. Below, the apostles lank both sides of Ludwig’s throne. he other walls were covered with paintings devoted to the lives of canonised and beatiied kings who played historically important roles in the spread of Christianity.47 An elaborate mosaic scheme, a key element in the overall symbolism of the room, decorated the loor of the hrone Room. Images of exotic animals and birds separated by stylised trees and encircled by a ring of abstract loral and geometric motifs, illed its central portion.48 he mosaic was thus meant to represent the terrestrial world, above which Christ, the angels, and saints preside in their heavenly realm. Seated on his throne in between these two pictorial worlds, the king would thus be literally positioned as God’s intercessor on earth, the contemporary descendant in a long lineage of canonised kings, harking all the way back to Constantine. Like them, Ludwig would have to mediate between the heavenly and earthly realms, ensuring the growth and advancement of Christianity as they had done before him. Overall then, the narrative program of the hrone Room was meant to function as an extended panegyric to Ludwig II and a visual elaboration of his historical role as the Christian monarch of Bavaria, ordained by God. In addition to the Neuschwanstein Castle, Ludwig had also envisioned an even more ambitious Neo-Byzantine project. In 1869, he instructed his court architect, Georg Dollmann, to draw up plans for a large new palace the size of Versailles in the Graswang Valley near Schloss Linderhof, which was meant to be decorated with sumptuous mosaics and a banded, polychromatic façade. Unfortunately, however, this project was never realised.49 Nevertheless, as these royal architectural ambitions demonstrate, in the German context the associations of Byzantium were entirely diferent from the Orientalising and primitivising views commonly found in France and Britain. Instead of being seen as decadent and ignoble, it was envisioned as a marker of stability, tradition, and magniicence. Given this broader cultural and political context, it is not surprising that it was in Germany that Byzantine studies were irst institutionalised as a serious discipline. he prominent Byzantinist, Karl Krumbacher, became the irst chair of Byzantine Studies at the University of Munich in 1891, where he inaugurated the now well-known Munich School of Byzantinology. In 1892, he launched the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, an academic journal of Byzantine studies, which to this day remains a leading forum for scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine history, society, and culture. At the same time, Carl de Boor published a series of critical, scholarly re-editions of key Byzantine texts such as Nikephoros’ Short History and heophanes’ Chronicle.50 Important centres of Byzantine Studies were also established in Berlin, Bonn, and Hamburg, and a number of signiicant scholarly studies on Byzantine art and architecture were published throughout the 1890s.51 In fact, by the close of the century, interest in Byzantine art had spread well beyond academic circles in Germany and was increasingly discussed in both the popular press and the most progressive art criticism of the day. In particular, writers made positive connections between the Byzantine mode of representation and contemporary MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 166 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 167 art movements, such as Jugendstil. For example, in his Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst of 1904, Julius Meier-Graefe devoted an entire section of his book to a discussion of Byzantine mosaics, which he considered to be an important precursor to Modernist aesthetics.52 Moreover, Meier-Graefe felt that Byzantine art was actually superior to subsequent Renaissance art in its ability to create a totalising aesthetic environment or Gesamtkunstwerk: he Byzantines were the irst to bring mosaic decoration to perfection. Modern research, blind to all but the analytical development of art, is inclined to neglect their work altogether, insisting much on the beauty and nobility of Early Christian examples, and treating the Byzantine more or less as barbaric aberrations … What do we moderns with our aesthetic trivialities know of such grandeur! If we could ill a room with the inest pictures of our century, if we could collect all that is greatest in Italian and in Northern art in a single gallery, it would remain a gallery, a space devoted to art, something isolated and remote that could never intoxicate the soul as do this barbaric gold and these barbaric symbols of the discredited Byzantines.53 Much like in Germany, the vast majority of Byzantine revivalist projects in Russia were also directly funded by the crown. Nicholas I notoriously stated that he encouraged Neo-Byzantine architecture out of political rather than aesthetic considerations.54 Just like Friedrich Wilhelm and Ludwig II, Nicholas I was interested in David Grimm, Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, 1871–97, Tilis, Georgia; demolished in 1930 (photograph taken by Joseph Baron de Baye and reproduced in Joseph Baron de Baye, Tilis: Souvenirs d’une Mission par le Baron de Baye (Paris: Librairie Nilsson, 1900)), p. 30. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 167 7.13 11/05/2016 19:25 168 7.14 civilisation and nineteenth-century art Yakov Kapkov, Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tartar Queen Taidula from Blindness while Dzhanibeg Looks On, 1840, oil on canvas, 57 × 67 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. replicating the undisputed authority of the Byzantine Emperor and the fervent collective devotion to the Orthodox Church, both of which set a historical precedent for his own ideological dictum of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality’. Accordingly, on 25 March 1841, an oicial decree was passed ordaining that ‘the taste of ancient Byzantine architecture should be preserved, by preference and as far as is possible’ in the construction of new ecclesiastical buildings.55 In addition to legitimising Nicholas I’s domestic policy, the strategic deployment of Byzantine revivalist architecture also had important international implications. he Byzantine style symbolised Constantinople’s historical ties with Kievan Rus, which in its turn served to bolster Russia’s expansionist policies in Eastern and Central Europe. It is therefore not a coincidence that it was speciically Neo-Byzantine designs that were favoured above all others in Russian colonial outposts. Neo-Byzantine monuments began to appear all over Central Asia, the northern Caucasus, and in the Cossack regions, along the Trans-Siberian Railway line (Figure 7.13). In recently conquered territories, these newly built Neo-Byzantine cathedrals would function as visual reminders to local populations of Russia’s own civilising mission, literally and metaphorically dominating the landscape with their imposing scale and lavish MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 168 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? Dionysius and workshop, Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tartar Queen Taidula from Blindness, detail of Metropolitan Alexis Vita Icon, 1480, oil and gold on wood panel, 197 × 152 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. 169 7.15 decoration. As Richard Wortman observes, ‘this type of thinking encouraged a kind of inverted archaeology: monuments were constructed to resurrect an invisible national past, particularly in regions deemed to need admonition and ediication’.56 he construction of barbarism and primitivism was thus displaced onto the Muslim populations of Central Asia and the Caucasus, while the Byzantine past began to occupy an entirely diferent imaginary space. Kievan Rus was increasingly understood as a lourishing centre of Byzantine culture and learning, which was prematurely crushed by the rapacious Mongolian ‘hordes’. According to this premise, Byzantium emerged as the deinitive origin of a sophisticated civilisation in contrast to the subsequent barbaric, primitive tribes arriving from the Far East. Yakov Kapkov’s 1840 painting of the Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tartar Queen Taidula from Blindness while Dzhanibeg Looks On (Figure 7.14) aptly visualises these ideas. According to the Nikonian Chronicle, in 1357 the Metropolitan Alexis was summoned to the Mongolian horde by the Khan to pray for the health of his sick wife, Taidula, who was alicted with a debilitating eye disease.57 After successfully curing the Tartar queen, Alexis was rewarded by the Khan with lavish gifts and ‘high honours’, as well as special concessions for the Orthodox Church.58 Kapkov appears to have based his composition on one of the smaller scenes from the wellknown ifteenth-century vita icon of the Metropolitan Alexis, attributed to the MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 169 11/05/2016 19:25 170 civilisation and nineteenth-century art Ivan Aivazovsky, Baptism of the Armenian People. Gregory the Illuminator (IV century), 1892, oil on canvas, 150 × 96 cm, heodosia Picture Gallery, heodosia, Ukraine. 7.16 workshop of the master icon-painter, Dionysius, and housed in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin until 1945 (Figure 7.15).59 In the icon, the ailing Taidula is propped up on her bed by an attendant as Alexis blesses her with holy water from a liturgical bowl, held by one of his helpers. Like Smirnov, Kapkov seems to have relied on a medieval Russo-Byzantine image as a primary source in his re-imagining of this historical episode. He repeats the overall structure and composition of the iconic representation with a few signiicant modiications. One of these alterations is the addition of Dzhanibeg himself, who is portrayed in the shadowy foreground of the painting, passively observing the scene with his hands folded on his lap. Another important addition is the centrally positioned candle, held by Alexis, which serves as the main source of light in the painting. As such, the visual rhetoric of the work metaphorically articulates a series of symbolic opposites: darkness is pitched against light, blindness against vision, ignorance against knowledge, and impotence against action. As a representative of the Orthodox faith, Alexis miraculously delivers the Mongol inidels from the ‘darkness’ of their barbaric ways, bringing them into the ‘light’ of the RussoByzantine faith and civilisation. Dzhanibeg can only passively observe Alexis, who actively brings relief and salvation. Five decades later, Ivan Aivazovsky produced a similar painting of Orthodox triumph in his Baptism of the Armenian People, Gregory the Illuminator (Figure 7.16), clearly demonstrating the continued currency of these ideas at the close of MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 170 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 171 the century. Dressed in Byzantine liturgical vestments, Gregory is portrayed as the Eastern Orthodox harbinger of enlightenment and civilisation in the face of barbarism. With a cross in hand and light radiating from his garments, Gregory is shown in the act of converting the Armenians from paganism to Christianity, bringing instruction and illumination to an otherwise primitive people. Aivazovsky emphatically contrasted Gregory’s heroic verticality with the horizontality of the wild, brutish Armenians, crouching animal-like at his feet and reduced by the artist to a virtually undiferentiated mass of paint in the middle ground of the painting. Just like Kapkov’s work, Aivazovsky’s painting re-imagines Eastern Orthodoxy as an alternative source of civilisation and a cultural and artistic paradigm for Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkan regions. In the wake of the Crimean War (1853–56), the rise of militant Slavophilia increasingly undermined Enlightenment formulations of civilisation as a single, historical process, driven by Western Europe. Prominent Slavophile thinkers such as Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevskii, and Konstantin Aksakov began to argue that rather than bring Russia into the fold of universal civilisation, Peter the Great’s Westernising reign had produced a painful rupture in the organic unfolding of Russian history by abruptly disconnecting the country from its rich Byzantine past. According to them, it was precisely this Byzantine heritage that had ensured that Russia had evolved a religious, political, philosophical, and aesthetic value system that ran contrary to the sterile materialism and rationalism of Western culture. Reversing the logic of the Enlightenment notion of universal progress, the Slavophiles argued that urbanisation, secularisation, and modernisation were not mechanisms that enabled the civilising process, but were instead the sources of Western Europe’s inevitable decline and eventual downfall. he earlier notions of Byzantium as a symbol of barbarism, ignorance, and backwardness – as expressed in the writings of Chaadaev and Herzen – were thus gradually replaced by the late 1860s with the understanding of Byzantium as the legitimate heir to classical antiquity and the wellspring of Eastern Europe’s civilisation and culture. Since the Byzantines had considered themselves to be Romans and referred to themselves as ‘Romaioi’, it was increasingly argued that it was the Christian theologians and writers of Byzantium, and not the West, who had conscientiously preserved the philosophy and ethics of antiquity.60 Embracing the words of the monk Filofei that ‘two Romes have fallen, the third endures, and a fourth there will not be’, the vast majority of Russians came to envision themselves as the modern heirs to the Roman Empire, by way of medieval Byzantium. In his widely read 1869 book, Russia and Europe, Nikolai Danilevskii argued that given this historical lineage, it was Russia’s imperative and historic mission to reclaim Constantinople and restore the Eastern Roman Empire, much like the Franks had restored the Western Roman Empire.61 He advocated the creation of a Slavic Federation under Russia’s political leadership, which would comprise of the Slavic countries, Greece, Romania, and the Magyars with its capital in Constantinople. Given the pro-Byzantine stance of the Russian state, the study of Byzantine history and culture acquired a new academic prestige, and dedicated scholars MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 171 11/05/2016 19:25 172 civilisation and nineteenth-century art prepared to take on specialised research in this ield began to proliferate in the 1860s and 1870s. Accordingly, much like in Germany, by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a serious tradition of Byzantine scholarship was irmly in place in Russia. In fact, already as early 1856, Prince Grigorii Gagarin – who was a former diplomat to Constantinople and the acting Vice President of the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts – established an icon-painting class and instigated the Museum of Early Christian Art at the Academy.62 According to the Academy’s records, by 1860 the museum housed over 1200 copies of Byzantine icons, frescoes, and mosaics, 200 architectural drawings, and 150 twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century Byzantine icons, as well as several mosaic fragments, which the archaeologist Piotr Sevastianov had brought over from Mt Athos and gifted to the Academy museum.63 Meanwhile, at the University of St Petersburg, Professors Vasilii Grigorievich Vasilievskii and Nikodim Kondakov lectured widely on Byzantine history, literature, art, and culture throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, institutionalising Byzantine studies as a major discipline in Russia. Kondakov, in particular, played an instrumental role in the Byzantine Revival, laying the foundations of the modern study of Byzantine art and architecture both in Russia and abroad.64 His doctoral thesis on he History of Byzantine Art and Iconography traced in the Miniatures of Greek Manuscripts was irst published in Odessa in 1876, and then again in an enlarged French edition in 1886.65 his ambitious work challenged the idea of a ‘frozen’ and ‘unchanging’ Byzantine tradition by tracing both an iconographic and stylistic evolution in the development of Byzantine art over the course of several centuries. It likewise attempted to draw parallels between Byzantine, Carolingian, and Renaissance art, arguing that Byzantium took part in a broader cultural and artistic exchange and was not as isolated and ‘primitive’ as was previously assumed. Kondakov’s subsequent pioneering publications on he Byzantine Mosaics of the Mosque of Kahrie-Dzhamisi in Constantinople (1881), he Iconography of Hagia Soia (1881), he Antiquities of the Mount Sinai Monastery (1882), and he Byzantine Churches and Monuments of Constantinople (1887) earned him both the professorship at the St Petersburg University (1888–97) and the position of head curator of the Medieval and Renaissance collections at the Hermitage Museum (1888–93). Meanwhile, his seminal 1892 publication Byzantine Enamels was simultaneously published in French and German, and established Kondakov’s international reputation as a leading expert in Byzantine art.66 It was also at this time that Kondakov became one of the initiators of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, which was opened there in 1895 under the leadership of Fiodor Uspenskii. he institute functioned not only as a research establishment, publishing sixteen scholarly volumes on the art and architecture of Constantinople, but also adopted the more active role of protecting and restoring surviving monuments of Byzantine antiquity, which had been neglected by the Ottoman authorities for centuries.67 Kondakov believed that as the true heir of Ancient Greece, Byzantium was the centre of development for all medieval art – Western and Eastern alike. hus, rather than seeing Byzantine art and architecture as a ‘regress’ or ‘interruption’ MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 172 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 173 in the trajectory of Western European art, Kondakov argued that it had, on the contrary, preserved Hellenistic forms for posterity. Indeed, thanks to the inluential publications of Kondakov and his students, Byzantine art was increasingly appreciated for its aesthetic achievements, rather than merely as a historical curiosity. his conceptual shift is clearly evidenced by the change in the exhibition practices of Byzantine artefacts by the end of the nineteenth century. he formerly archaeological and ethnographic approach, typically reserved for ‘primitive’ cultures, was gradually replaced by an art historical one. Instead of displaying medieval icons and manuscripts alongside weaponry, lint tools, pagan stone idols, and Scythian objects, exhibition organisers began to apply an art-historical organisational logic to Russo-Byzantine art in the same way that they did to Western European masterpieces. hus, for example, the large exhibition of medieval objects that took place in the State Historical Museum in Moscow in January of 1890 was accompanied by a well-researched catalogue that meticulously chronicled all the pieces on display. Similarly, at the Archaeological Institute Exhibition that opened in St Petersburg in December of 1898, the artworks were arranged both chronologically and according to the diferent ‘schools’ of icon-painting – the Novgorod, Muscovy, Pskov, and so-called ‘Crete’ Schools from Nikolai Likhachev’s collection. he organisers went to great lengths to demonstrate both stylistic variation and a gradual iconographic and formal evolution from the ifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, focusing on the high ‘aesthetic’ achievement of these works.68 his broader cultural context helps to explain why Vasilii Smirnov was so zealously dedicated to archaeological accuracy in his representation of Byzantium in he Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors. By the late 1880s, within the Russian context, Byzantium was understood as a mighty civilisation with a rich history and a vibrant artistic culture that had produced a wealth of valuable masterpieces. Accordingly, Smirnov took great care to ensure that his version of Byzantium matched the general public expectation, which at that point was already fairly well-informed about Byzantine history, art, and culture, both as a result of oicial state policy and advances in Byzantine scholarship and archaeology. In contrast to Benjamin-Constant’s imaginative evocation of a distant and foreign place, loosely ‘Eastern’ and largely barbaric, Smirnov’s work functions as a visual testament to the former grandeur of a bygone, but nonetheless accessible, national past. To sum up, then, as evidenced by Smirnov’s and Benjamin-Constant’s paintings, multiple, competing Byzantiums coexisted within the broader European imaginary throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. While in some contexts representations of Byzantium were part of the larger phenomenon of Orientalism and European colonial domination, in others they were intimately linked with questions of national identity, religion, and heritage. As such, the concept of civilisation lent itself to continuous revisions and modiications throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Rather than being seen as a single, teleological path to social progress, the idea of civilisation was ininitely recast in a complex process of ongoing international negotiation. he Byzantine Revival thus demonstrates that MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 173 11/05/2016 19:25 174 civilisation and nineteenth-century art the discursive construction of the civilised versus the primitive did not simply exist as a ixed and stable, binary opposition. Instead, it was in a state of constant lux and evolution, in accordance with the demands, exigencies, and needs of particular political and cultural contexts. Notes 1 Mark Antlif and Patricia Leighten, ‘Primitive’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shif (eds), Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 217. 2 See David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 122–99 and Mark Bassin, ‘Russia and Asia’, in Nicholas Rzhevsky (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 57–84. 3 Paul Stephenson, ‘Pioneers of Popular Byzantine History: Freeman, Gregorovious, Schlumberger’, in he Byzantine World (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 462–80. 4 I have previously discussed these two artworks in Evgeny Steiner’s Orientalism/Occidentalism: he Languages of Culture vs. the Languages of Description (Moscow: Sovpadenie, 2012), pp. 80–1, 85–6. 5 Ibid., p. 85 6 In 1884 Smirnov was selected by the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts to travel to Italy as an academic pensioner, where he lived and studied for three years. See L. I. Iovleva and Ia.V. Bruk (eds) Gosudarstvennaia Tretiakovskaia Galereia: Katalog Sobraniia. Zhivopis’ Vtoroi Polovini XIX veka, Volume IV, Book II (Moscow: Krasnaia Ploshchad’ Publishers, 2006), pp. 312–15. 7 See Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324–1453, vol. 1 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), pp. 6–8 and Robert S. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 24–25; J. B. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered (London: Phaidon, 2003), pp. 7–8. 8 Voltaire, Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Impr. de la Société littéraire-typographique, 1784–89). Quoted in Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, p. 6. 9 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: G. Bell and sons, 1900), p. 353. Quoted in Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, p. 6. 10 Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 196. 11 Letter from Percy Shelley to Mary Shelley, dated August, 1821. Journal of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Letters from Geneva. Journal at Geneva: Ghost Stories. Journal: Return to England. Letters from Italy (London: Lea and Blanchard, 1840), p. 212. Quoted in Nelson, Hagia Sophia, p. 27. 12 Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 7 (London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1782–1788), pp. 118–22. 13 Pyotr Chaadaev, ‘Philosophicheskiye Pisma: Pismo Pervoe’, quoted in A. F. Zamaleev, Rossiia glazami russkogo: Chaadaev, Leont’ev, Solobév (Sankt-Peterburg: ‘Nauka’, S.-Peterburgskoe otd-nie, 1991), p. 30. 14 Alexander Herzen, My Past and houghts: the Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 614–15. 15 John Ruskin, Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (London, Smith, Elder, 1851–53), p. 92. 16 Ibid., p. 148. 17 Edward Freeman, A History of Architecture (London: J. Masters, 1849), pp. 164–5. 18 Ibid., p. 165 19 Ibid., p. 166 20 Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne grecque et latine (Dionysius de Fourna), introduction by Adolphe-Napoleon Didron, trans. Paul Durand (Paris: Impr. Royale, 1845). MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 174 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 175 For a detailed account of this discovery and publication, see Nelson, Hagia Sophia, pp. 46–7. Didron, Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne grecque et latine, p. ix. Alexis Francois Rio, Poetry of Christian Art (London: T. Bosworth, 1854), p. 15. For a discussion of the growing interest in Byzantine art and architecture by leading Arts and Crafts practitioners, see Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered, pp. 164–8 and Nelson, Hagia Sophia, pp. 105–28. Charles Bayet, L’Art Byzantine (Paris: Ancienne Masion Quantin Libraries-Imprimeries Réunies, 1883); William R. Lethaby and Harold Swainson, he Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building (London: Macmillan, 1894). Other notable studies of Byzantine art and architecture during this period include Auguste Choisy’s L’ Art de bâtir chez les Byzantins (Paris: Société anonyme de publications périodiques, 1883); Henri Bordier’s Description des peintures et autres ornements contenus dans les manuscrits grecs de la Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris: H. Champion, 1883) and Gabriel Millet, Monastère de Daphni:histoire, architecture, mosaïques (Paris: E. Leroux,1899). William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1870), pp. 13–14. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered, p. 103. Elena Boeck, ‘Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s heodor’, Byzantium/Modernism Conference, Yale University, New Haven, 21 April 2012. Ibid. Ibid. ‘A Glimpse of Bernhardt Of the Stage’, Sunday Herald, Sunday 17 April 1887. Quoted by Boeck, ‘Archaeology of Decadence’. George Young, Nationalism and War in the Near East (By a Diplomatist) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), p. 40. Unlike in Britain and France, where representations of Byzantium appeared in a limited number of academic paintings and salon sculptures by artists such as Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Paul Laurens, and Solomon Joseph Solomon as part of a broader historicist and Orientalist trend, in Russia the Byzantine theme was much more pervasive. Similarly, there are various examples of eclectic architectural and mosaic citations of Byzantium in Britain and France throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, but these were rarely part of systematic programmes as was the case in Russia and Germany. Russia had fought against the Ottoman Empire in 1806–12, 1828–29, 1853–56, and in 1877–78. For an in-depth analysis of the competing European ambitions in the Balkans, see Marian Kent (ed.), he Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984) and Alexander Macie, he Eastern Question, 1774–1923 (London: Longman, 1996). For a detailed overview of Friedrich Wilhem IV’s revivalist architectural projects, see Gerd H. Zuchold, ‘Friedrich Wilhelm IV und die Byzanzrezeption in der preussischen Baukunst’, in Otto Busch (ed.), Friedrich Wilhelm IV in seiner Zeit: Beiträge eines Colloquiums (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1987), pp. 205–31; David E. Barclay, Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 24–48; Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950, pp. 37–45; Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered, pp. 24–33. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, p. 41 Barclay, Frederick William IV, p. 24 Ibid. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, pp. 42–5. Gerd H. Zuchold, ‘Friedrich Wilhelm IV’, p. 224. Barclay, Frederick William IV, p. 25. he construction of Neuschwanstein Castle began in 1869, but was never completed during Ludwig’s lifetime. For a detailed discussion of the preliminary design, construction, and interior decoration of the castle, see Marcus Spangenberg, he hrone Room in Schloss Neuschwanstein: MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 175 11/05/2016 19:25 176 civilisation and nineteenth-century art 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 176 Ludwig II of Bavaria and his vision of Divine Right, trans. Katherine Vanovitch (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 1999) and Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered, pp. 34–45. Ludwig II, ‘Letter to his Court secretary, Lorenz von Dulipp’, 30 July 1876. Quoted in Spangenberg, he hrone Room in Schloss Neuschwanstein, p. 20. Spangenberg, he hrone Room in Schloss Neuschwanstein, p. 13 Ibid., p. 61 Ibid, pp. 44–51. Bullen suggests that these motifs were derived from the twelfth-century Byzantine mosaics of the Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo. See Byzantium Rediscovered, p. 41. Spangenberg, he hrone Room in Schloss Neuschwanstein, p. 18 Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople, Nicephori Opuscula Historica, ed. C. de Boor (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1880); heophanes, he Confessor, Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor, 2 vols, Corpus Scriptores Historiae Byzantinae (Leipzig, 1883–85). Johan Tikkanen, Die Genesis mosaiken von S. Marco in Venedig und ihr verhältniss zu den miniaturen der Cottonbibel, nebst einer untersuchung über den ursprung der mittelalterlichen Genesisdarstellung besonders in der byzantinischen und italienischen kunst (Helsingfors, 1891); Johannes Schulz, Der byzantinische zellenschmelz (Frankfurt a.M.: Druckerei von A. Osterrieth, 1890); Jean Paul Richter, Quellen der byzandtinischen Kunstgeschichte ausgewählte Texte über die Kirchen, Klöster, Paläste, Staatsgebäude und andere Bauten von Konstantinopel (Vienna: C. Graeser, 1897). Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a new System of Aesthetics, trans. Florence Simmonds and George W. Chrystal (London, W. Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1968). Ibid., pp. 16–17. Iurii Savelev, Vizantiiskii Stil v Arhitekture Rossii: Vtoraia Polovina XIX-nachalo XX veka (Sankt-Peterburg: ‘Liki Rossii’: ‘Proekt-2003’, 2005), p. 28. Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii 12 (St Petersburg, 1857), 49. he provision is article 218 of the Stroitel’nyi Ustav, quoted in Richard Wortman, ‘he “Russian Style” in Church Architecture as Imperial Symbol after 1881’, in James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland (eds), Architectures of Russian Identity, 1500 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 102. Wortman, ‘he Russian Style’, in Church, p. 103. he Nikonian Chronicle, Volume hree: From the Year 1241 to the Year 1381, ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky, trans. Serge A. and Betty Jean Zenkovsky (Princeton: Kingston Press, 1986), p. 241. Ibid., p. 242. V. N. Lazarev, Moskovskaia Shkola Ikonopisi (Moscow: Iskusstvo), p. 66. See Aleksei Khomiakov, ‘he voice of a Greek in defense of Byzantium’, Works of A. S. Khomiakov, vol. 3, 4th edn (Moscow: Univ. tip, 1900), p. 366 and Timofei Granovsky, Sochineniya, 4th edn (Moscow, 1900). Nikolay Danilevskii, Rossiia I Evropa, 4th edn (St Petersburg: Izdanie N. Strakhova, 1889), pp. 398–473. A. V. Kornilova, Grigorii Gagarin: Tvorcheskii Put’ (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2001), p. 195. For an account of Sevastianov’s Byzantine art collection and his expeditions to Mt. Athos, see Iu. A. Piatnitskii, ‘P. I. Sevastianov i ego sobranie’, in V. S. Shandrovskaia (ed), Vizantinovedenie v ̇rmitazhe (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi ̇rmitazh, 1991), pp. 19–24. My chief sources here are Irina Kyzlasova, Istoria izucheinia vizantiiskogo i drevnerusskogo iskusstva v Rossii: F. I. Buslaev, N. P. Kondakov: metody, idei, teorii (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1985) and Gerold Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia i izucheniia russkoi srednevekovoi zhivopisi: XIX vek (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986). Nikodim Kondakov, Istoriia Vizantiiskogo Iskusstva i Ikonograii po Miniaturam Grecheskikh Rukopisei (Odessa, V tip. Ul’rikha i Shul’tse, 1876); M. Trawinski (ed.), Histoire de l’Art Byzantin Considéré Principalement dans Les Miniatures (Paris: Jules Rouam, 1886). Nikodim Kondakov, Histoire et Monuments des Emaux Byzantins (Frankfurt am Main, 1892); 11/05/2016 19:25 second rome or seat of savagery? 177 Geschichte und Denkmäler des Byzantinischen Emails (Frankfurt am Main: Typographische Anstalt A. Osterrieth, 1892). 67 For an account of the Institute’s formation and activities, see Iu. A. Piatnitskii, ‘Russkii Archeologicheskii Institut v Konstantinopole (RAIK)’, in V. S. Shandrovskaia (ed.), Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi Ermitazh, 1991), pp. 28–31. 68 Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia i izucheniia russkoi srednevekovoi zhivopisi, p. 209. MUP_O’Brien_Revision3.indd 177 11/05/2016 19:25