Period Styles

Dramatic illustrations of saintly deaths, as well as elaborate tombs featuring portraits of the deceased, were among the most powerful and persistent images in medieval Byzantium from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Such artistic monuments expressed both individual and communal ideas about death, and life after death. Byzantine Christians believed in the soul's gradual separation from the earthly body after dying, led forth by the archangel Michael. This separation of the soul from the flesh happened over the course of three days and concluded ultimately, at the end of time, in the Last Judgment, a belief held commonly by medieval Christians in both East and West. At the Last Judgment, the individual soul was either eternally condemned to hell or placed among the saved in the gardens of Paradise.

 

Mindfulness of death coupled with the personal obligation to pious behavior and good works were pervasive in Byzantine religious thought and practice. This ethos was succinctly expressed by Archbishop Symeon of Thessaloniki (d. 1429) in the opening of his sermon on death: "We are unendingly and ceaselessly in every moment obliged to care for the things concerning the fearsome and inexorable end of our lives." Regular prayers offered by the living on behalf of the dead were believed to increase the likelihood of the soul's favorable judgment. In Theodora Synadene's charter for the nunnery of the Virgin of Sure Hope in Constantinople (1327–35), the foundress makes this point clear: "[May] the commemorations of the departed be celebrated, as I have instructed, with all zeal and diligence. Thus may the Lord look mercifully and graciously on the souls of those who are commemorated, and give them rest in a bright place . . ." In Byzantine religious practice, prayers could be spoken on behalf of the dead to increase the likelihood of a favorable judgment for that individual at the end of time. Such prayers for the dead in Byzantium were performed in a number of contexts, including: inpersonal prayers spoken by individuals remembering deceased relatives and loved ones; in monastic rites of commemoration for individuals or families, conducted by nuns and monks at the request of a monastery's original founder or later benefactors; and in the brief prayers for the entire community of the dead spoken during the regular performance of the Divine Liturgy, or Eucharistic service. Artistic imagery related to death and salvation often served as the immediate backdrop for these rites in honor of the dead.

 

 

 

Brooks, Sarah . "Art and Death in Medieval Byzantium". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.