ISTANBUL, MARBLE INTARSIA WITH SAINT EUDOCIA

Excavations in the Monastery of Lips, the present Fenari Isa Camii in Istanbul, have brought to light a considerable number of fragments of icons in marble inlay, the so-called opus Alexandrinum, but the only one completely preserved is this one depicting Saint Eudocia. These icons belong to a period either contemporary with or not much later than the foundation of the church - the tenth or perhaps early eleventh century.

The daughter of an Athenian philosopher, herself a poetess known by the pagan name Athenais, Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II (408-450), became a devout Christian and is remembered in the church on August 13 for having brought the chains of Saint Peter and the relics of Saint Stephen from Jerusalem to Constantinople. Crowned and dressed in the full regalia of an empress, including the so-called thorakion, the shield-like drapery over her hips, she is rendered as an Orant in a strongly hieratic pose. The matrix is white marble, into which colored pieces of marble, paste, and glass are set - pink for the flesh tones, yellow for the halo to imitate gold, dark red-brown for the garments suggesting the imperial purple, and green for the ornamental borders, with the extent of emeralds.

Marble intarsia enjoyed its most flourishing period in the fourth to sixth centuries, a period rich in precious techniques of all kinds, and it was revived in Constantinople during the tenth century as a conscious recapturing of the luxury of those past centuries.

It is in the nature of the technique that the artistic effect is two-dimensional and thus dematerialized, intensified by the engraved design of the face. A flat, uncorporeal style had dominated the period just before, during, and immediately after Iconoclasm (Plate 9), preceding the revival of relief sculpture in the Macedonian Renaissance. There are already among the Fenari Isa finds a few inlaid fragments in low relief.

Excerpted from The Icon by Kurt Weitzmann, 1978.

Home Page

Last updated: March 18, 1998