From Earth to Heaven: Transcendental Concepts of Architecture in Late Roman and Early Byzantine Art (c.300–700)

Abstract

This chapter considers the use of architectural motifs as symbolic concepts in Late Roman and Early Byzantine art. Although formally, functionally, and contextually related to built counterparts, the visual constructions discussed here do not represent actual monumental architecture, or do so only in limited and ambiguous ways. Late antique art is rich in what may be called architectural imagery, that is, figural compositions in which an architectural structure provides a visually prominent and regularizing element. Arches, portals, pedimented fronts, aedicules, and domes certainly appeared in Greco-Roman art before late antiquity, but much less frequently, and for the most part in funerary works. The significant increase of formal and contextual diversification of architectural motifs in the visual culture of late antiquity can perhaps chiefly be explained by their suitability for the hieratic and abstracted mode of representation that was developed, i.e., their usefulness in the creation of symbolic art, but they would arguably also have reflected an expanded visual conception of architecture in general, and of certain architectural types and themes as bearers of abstract meaning in particular. Indeed, examples of late antique pictorial or imaged architecture may be considered as graphic illustrations of the ideational superstructures attached to actual or built architecture in this period: physical architecture and imaged architecture were part of the same language of forms, constituting mutually reflective articulations of one ‘universal’ architectural perception. As a visual technique and a means of expression essentially unconstrained by the physical laws of tectonics, imaged architecture allowed for near limitless variation, modification, and synthesis of established architectural types and elements. The resulting creations range from the reductively abstract to the imaginatively fantastical, and often to the architectonically illogical and sometimes to the seemingly nonsensical. Yet a systematic analysis reveals clear and consistent patterns not only in their conceptual construction but also in their contextual application and relevance. Generally speaking, the function and meaning of architectural motifs in late antique art were to define and glorify man in his different roles and fields of action, and to give visual form to prevailing notions and beliefs about the nature and composition of society, the world, and the cosmos.