Syriac Contributions to Italio-Byzantine Art

Fr. Dale Johnson

Often Syriac culture is undervalued for its wealth of contributions to the Byzantine world. The dominance of Greek culture has often swallowed up creative contributions of the Syriac world and claimed it for themselves. The Gospel of Rabbula is a primary example of primal creativity that has affected western art for centuries. Even in later Syriac iconography where cross fertilization of ideas merge, Syriac artists continue to make original contributions.

The Syriac vision of the Ascension of Jesus taken up into heaven is the earliest example illustrating Jesus in a mandorla on a chariot. In Syriac liturgy Ezekiel 1 is read on Ascension Sunday. The image of Ezekiel being taken up into heaven in a chariot is figuratively fused with the ascending Jesus. A mandorla is the liminal space where two circles overlap. It is a powerful symbol of the psychological and spiritual realm where opposites merge and transformation occurs.

The Rabbula Gospel icon of the Ascension:

In the Rabbula Gospels the mandorla is the almond shaped space where heaven and earth meet and Jesus as prophet is fulfilled and heaven and earth are transformed. The mandorla is the place where dualism disappears and we leave the world of opposites and rest in the heart of Jesus.

Nicholas of Cusa speaks of the coincidence of contradictories or coincidentia oppositorum:


The coincidence of opposites is a certain kind of unity perceived as coincidence, a unity of contrarieties overcoming opposition by convergence without destroying or merely blending the constituent elements. Although in once sense not obliterated, in another the constituent elements shed their multiple, differentiated status. Examples would include the coincidence of rest and motion, past and future, diversity and identity, inequality and equality, and divisibility and simplicity.


... coincidence does not really describe God. Rather it sets forth the way God works, the order of things in relation to God and to each other, and the manner by which humans may approach and abide in God. God is beyond the realm of contradictories. God ... preceded opposites, is undifferentiated, not other, incomparable, and without opposite, precedes distinctions, opposition, contrariety, and contradiction.


H. Lawrence Bond in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, p. 366


The almond shaped space endured for more than a 1000 years in western art emerging in Perugino’s Ascension as late as the 15th century.


The Mandorla, a Vesica Piscis shaped aureola, surrounds the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary in western Christian art. It is especially used later to frame the figure of Christ in Majesty in early medieval and Romanesque art, as well as Byzantine art of the same periods.


Among Icons of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the mandorla is used to depict sacred moments which transcend time and space, such as the Resurrection, Transfiguration, and the Dormition of the Theotokos. These mandorla will often be painted in several concentric patterns of color which grow darker as they come close to the center. This is in keeping with the church's use of Apophatic theology, as described by Dionysius the Areopagite and others. As holiness increases, there is no way to depict its brightness, except by darkness.


The Rabbula Gospel icon of Saint Longinus


Another contribution of the Syriac art of the Gospel of Rabbula is in the image of Saint Longinus, the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus. The earliest known representation of St. Longinus is in the image of the Crucifixion in the Rabbula Gospels (Syriac, 6th century). In the West, late medieval Crucifixions often show him pointing to Jesus, as if to say, "surely this was the Son of God" but this is a conflation of two stories depicting two soldiers.


Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion tell of a Roman soldier who pierced Jesus' side after his death and also of another centurion who said, "surely this was the Son of God." The Acts of Pilate (possibly as early as the second century) is probably responsible for conflating these two persons into one named Longinus. Later hagiography that was subsumed into the Golden Legend says that some of the blood that spilled from Christ's side got into Longinus' eyes and cured his blindness; the Legend also says St. Longinus converted to Christianity and was martyred in Cæsarea in Cappadocia.

Syriac Christianity continued to make original contributions to western art as late as the 13th century.


Dayr as Suriani icon in the 13th Century


Lucy Anne Hunt of Birmingham writes, “An icon of the Crucifixion is displayed in the main church of the Virgin at the Monastery of the Syrians (Dayr as-Suriani), in the Wadi Natrun in the Western Desert in Egypt’.

Attributed here to a Syrian Orthodox artist in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, its imagery of mankind’s salvation through the Passion of Christ’s suffering and death is expressed in the vocabulary of contemporary Italian art. With the personifications at the top representing the overturn of the darkness of death with the light of renewal, the icon evokes the Orthodox Easter liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This points up a virtually unexplored aspect of medieval Passion iconography. Focusing attention on the Syrian Orthodox role in icon production, the icon is a witness to the development and dissemination of Holy Land imagery in the thirteenth-century eastern Mediterranean.


Hunt posits that the painter of the Dayr as-Suriani icon probably had direct access to Italian art. This is particularly apparent both in the extreme angle of Christ’s black eyebrow and the exaggerated dark shading of the face, especially below the left cheek merging into the strands of hair. This dramatic shading was surely derived from the painting technique of the mid-thirteenth century Italian crucifixes, including those painted by Giunta Pisano. The comparison can be extended to the delicate flecks of white paint highlighting the face, upper body and outstretched arms of Christ. The large scale of Christ’s head relative to the rest of the icon also derives from a crucifix, exaggerated as to be viewed from below. But the generally heavier painting style identifies a Syrian rather than a Latin artist as responsible, working under the influence of Italian art.


The Crucifixion in the Syriac Dayr as-Zapharan lectionary, written in c. 1250 by a future Bishop of Hesna de Ziad, the town of Kharput near the Euphrates on the former Byzantine/Armenian border, has a similar Italianate Christ and angels . Like the icon, the rationale to the draperies, John’s in particular, is here disregarded in the hands of a Syrian artist”. The blood of Christ, shed for man- kind, flows copiously onto the skull of Adam, just as in the Dayr as-Suriani and Sinai icons and the Missal Crucifixion”. Adam’s skull is even especially selected for inscription in the lectionary. Thus, while Sinai or Egypt cannot be discounted as the place of production of the icon, a strong case can be made for a monastery in Syria”.


Dayr as-Suriani flourished after the mid-thirteenth century with an influx of monks, especially those fleeing from the Crusader battles between Eygpt and Mongol invaders. War helped replenish the Library, and may have brought icons too.
http://www.socdigest.org/articles/01sep08.html