Architectural ceramics

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In Byzantium

In Byzantium, the production of architectural ceramics was limited to a relatively short period. It began in the eleventh century, in the middle of the Macedonian period (867–1056), and continued until the twelfth century, i.e. until the beginning of the Comnenian period (1081–1185).

Ceramic coverings were part of the Byzantine programme for decorating ecclesiastical and secular buildings. They have been discovered in Constantinople, in the ruins of the Monastery of Constantine Lips, the Basilica of Topkapi Saray, the Martyrion of Saint Euphemia, and the Churches of Myrelaion, St. John of Studios, St. Polyeuct, and St. Georges at Mangan. They have also been discovered in Bulgaria in the monasteries of Preslav, Tuzlalak, and Patleina. Decorative plaques on secular buildings are rare. Some have been found in the Great Palace of Constantinople, the high school of Zeuxippos and between the churches of Hagia Sophia and St. Irene; and in Bulgaria, in the Great Palace of Preslav, and the home of an official and a lord at Seliste. These whiteware polychrome-painted plaques were discovered on the floors of the rooms, at the foot of the walls they covered. None of them have been found in situ fixed into the masonry. The shape and size of these tiles tell us about their use inside buildings. They covered columns, pilasters, cornices, capitals, and friezes, and served as framing around doors, windows, and icons. Some tiles were used to decorate iconostases (cloison separating the sanctuary of the nave and bearing icons), others were inserted in the limestone slabs as a floor covering, probably used as substitutes for marble mosaics and plaques. They were decorated with motifs painted in dark red outlines that blackened after firing (a solution of ground hematite), decorated with coloured glazes—the chromatic palette varied from green to grey-blue, black to brown, yellow and ochre—, and covered with a colourless lead glaze. The subjects are naturalistic with friezes of animals passing by, ducks in medallions, peacocks and rosettes, geometric and religious decorations—archangels, busts of saints, full-length saints and martyrs, Madonna and Child, and Christ on the Throne. Although some of the decorative elements of these architectural ceramics, such as the stylized leaf-and-darts and the ovum, are Classical in origin—this is characteristic of Macedonian Renaissance art—, others such as the palmettes, fleurons, and the peacock feathers show eastern and Sassanian influences. The appearance of these motifs on pottery was achieved through the application of Byzantine luxury silks whose iconography, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, was strongly influenced by the contemporary Iranian works that prolonged the Sassanian tradition.

These tiles were made in the Constantinople workshops. Chemical analyses of the whiteware plaques, which were found in the capital, show that the clay came from Arnavutköy, a village on the European bank of the Bosphorus. However, a text from 1192, stating that the church of the Botaniates Palace (tenth or eleventh century) on the Golden Horn was surrendered to the Genoese, claims that the ceramic plaques were made in Nicomedia. But the theory remains unconvincing. In Bulgaria, more than ten workshops have been discovered in Preslav, close to the buildings that were decorated. It has long been believed that their production was linked to the extensive work undertaken in the capital by King Simeon (first Bulgarian kingdom, 893–972). But today it would seem that these dates are wrong. The production of architectural ceramics, which is similar to that of Constantinople, seems more likely to have been linked to the reconquest of Bulgaria by Basil II. These ceramic coverings, probably the work of itinerant potters from Constantinople, may have been undertaken as part of the Hellenization programme of the Slavic Church at the beginning of the eleventh century.

V. F.