Half-length, frontal and set against a curved field of gold, the John Chrysostom mosaic in the katholikon of Hosios Loukas shows the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople within one of the best-preserved mosaic programmes of Middle Byzantine art. The portrait fills a conch in the naos, above the zone of marble revetment, and belongs to the decoration of the monastery's principal church, generally placed in the early eleventh century. The mosaicist is not known.
On the western slopes of Mount Helikon, near Distomo and the village of Steiri in Boeotia, lies the monastery that grew around the tomb of the local holy man Luke of Steiris. Luke was born in 896, settled at the site in 946/7 and remained there until his death in 953. Together with Daphni and Nea Moni on Chios, Hosios Loukas forms a single property on the UNESCO list. The earlier Panagia church adjoins the larger katholikon, whose interior still carries the mosaic image of Chrysostom in its original architectural position.
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| Saint John Chrysostom, early eleventh century, mosaic in a conch of the naos, katholikon of the Monastery of Hosios Loukas, Boeotia. |
A Hierarch in a Conch of the Naos
The position of the bishops matters at Hosios Loukas. Gregory the Theologian and Athanasius are placed in the sanctuary proper, whereas Basil, John Chrysostom, Gregory Thaumatourgos and Nicholas occupy the naos, the space of the monks and pilgrims. The John Chrysostom mosaic belongs to this second group and is usually identified as the portrait in the south-east conch of the naos. Such dispersal was still common in churches of the ninth to eleventh centuries; only from the end of the eleventh century did the lower register of the apse become the fixed place for the holy bishops. At Hosios Loukas, the arrangement belongs to a moment before the liturgical choir of hierarchs had been gathered permanently around the altar.
Everything within the conch is governed by the shape of its field. A broad semi-elliptical surface of gold, bordered by a thin red line and a narrower band of green, rises behind the figure, and above it runs an arch whose voussoirs alternate between green and reddish-brown. The bust is cut off by the lower edge of the conch, so that the saint appears to lean slightly forward over the space below. His nimbus, gold on gold, is held apart from the surrounding ground only by a dark outline.
Dark letters flank the halo. The inscription, in Greek majuscule with abbreviations and stacked letters, names the figure as Saint John Chrysostom: title and forename are placed on the viewer's left, the epithet "Chrysostomos" on the right. Divided by the head in this way, the name frames the face without competing with it, the lettering following the gentle curve of the field.
Omophorion, Cross and Gospel Book in the John Chrysostom Mosaic
The vestments are those of a bishop of the period, rendered in blocks of strongly contrasting colour. Over a dark, purplish-brown phelonion lies a white omophorion marked with large black crosses; two of these, at the shoulders, form a broad V across the chest, while the long end of the omophorion descends along the saint's left side, partly behind the book. At the neck, a striped collar of ochre and gold belongs to the sticharion, which reappears on his right arm where the phelonion has been gathered back. The sleeve falls in closely set ochre folds and ends in a patterned cuff of dark red and gold.
Close to his body, in his right hand, he holds a slender gold cross, grasping the shaft between thumb and fingers. His left hand, bare and open, supports a Gospel book from beneath. Gold is the cover, framed by a dark border with red corner accents and bearing a cross with flaring arms surrounded by pearls and small green leaf-shaped motifs; along the fore-edge, facing the viewer's left, red bands mark the clasps or the edges of the pages.
These attributes deserve a moment's attention because they depart from a well-established formula. In the north tympanum of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, all the bishops were shown with the right hand raised in blessing before the breast and the left hand, covered by a fold of the chasuble, supporting the Gospel book. The John Chrysostom mosaic at Hosios Loukas replaces the blessing with the cross and leaves the supporting hand uncovered. No inscription or text explains the choice, and assigning it a specific meaning would be imprudent. Visually, however, the change makes the figure more compact, with the two hands occupied by objects of comparable weight, cross and book placed on either side of the central axis.
The Ascetic Type of John Chrysostom
The Byzantine image of Chrysostom was never fixed once and for all. In the study of the Hagia Sophia Church Fathers by Mango and Hawkins, Otto Demus's classification is summarised in three types. An early "iconic" type shows a relatively young man with an oval face and sparse beard; the "ascetic" type, dominant from the eleventh century onwards, gives him an almost bald head, a high bulbous forehead, an aquiline nose, sunken eyes, emaciated cheeks, a pointed chin and a short beard; a third, "humanistic" type keeps some hair receding from the forehead and more masculine features.
An early and clear witness to the second of these is the mosaic at Hosios Loukas. A later written tradition matters here as well. A description attributed to "Ulpius the Roman", composed between about 850 and 950, speaks of Chrysostom as extremely thin, long-nosed and pale, with hollow eye sockets, a bald and wrinkled high forehead, large ears and a short, very sparse beard. Almost every item in that list can be found in the mosaic, translated into the vocabulary of monumental art: thinness carried by line, pallor through a controlled range of ochres and olive shadows.
Something of the saint's biography is contained in this physiognomy. Archbishop of Constantinople from 398, deposed and exiled in 404, John died in exile in 407; his reputation as a preacher gave him the epithet "golden-mouthed", and the Divine Liturgy most frequently celebrated in the Orthodox Church bears his name. For an eleventh-century monastic community, an image stressing his ascetic formation had an obvious resonance. Preacher and bishop remain present in the portrait, yet the emaciated face could also speak readily to the monastic setting in which the mosaic was seen.
The Face in Detail: Tesserae, Line and Modelling
Seen at closer range, the John Chrysostom mosaic reveals how much of its effect depends on the setting of the tesserae. The head, small in relation to the nimbus, sits within it almost exactly at the centre. Over the enormous domed cranium, lighter tesserae are laid in concentric arcs that describe both the curvature of the skull and the creases of the forehead; a single dark tuft of hair survives at the crown, while the remaining hair gathers in tight dark curls above the ears.
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| Detail of the head, showing the ascetic type of Chrysostom modelled in finely set tesserae of ochre, rose and olive. |
The eyes dominate. Large, wide open and fixed on the beholder, they are outlined in dark tesserae, with heavy upper lids and swollen pouches beneath that deepen the impression of vigilance and fatigue. From the inner ends of the brows, the long, straight nose descends in a narrow band of light, flanked by darker cubes. Olive and brown shadows hollow the cheeks as they run diagonally towards a small, closed mouth; the moustache droops at the corners, while the short beard, thin and pointed, is built from brown tesserae interspersed with lighter ones, giving it a sparse appearance.
Across the face, the flesh tones move from rose and pale ochre on the forehead and cheekbones to warm brown in the shadowed areas. Firm dark lines around the ears, jaw and neck hold the modelling in place. Below the chin, two lines mark the tendons of the neck above the striped collar. In the nimbus, the gold tesserae are set in rings following its circumference; beyond it, across the open field, their direction changes into broader horizontal and curving rows. Because these differently set surfaces catch the light unevenly, the halo remains legible as a distinct, slightly more luminous disc although it shares the colour of the surrounding ground.
A comparable concentration of effort on face and hands, with greater economy across the larger areas of drapery, is visible in the Hodegetria mosaic of the same katholikon, beside the shrine of Hosios Loukas. In both mosaics, the darkest garments provide a quiet mass against which the exposed features acquire their intensity.
Dating the Mosaics of the Katholikon
Within certain limits only is the chronology of the church secure. The katholikon is tentatively dated to 1011–12, and sculptural evidence has been drawn into the argument: close links with carved decoration in two of the monastery's dependencies on Euboea, one of them at Aliveri dated by inscription to 1014, support a date of about 1011 for the construction of the katholikon. The consensus is incomplete, however, since an alternative placing of the building in the 1040s and 1050s has also been argued. The mosaics are normally considered part of the decoration completed after construction, and the John Chrysostom mosaic shares their date, whichever of these chronological frames is preferred.
An early eleventh-century date would bring the portrait close in time to the court painting of Constantinople around 1000, represented by manuscripts such as the Menologion of Basil II, where the saints' calendar is illustrated with hundreds of figures. Whether the mosaicists of Hosios Loukas came from the capital, or from a workshop trained in its idiom and active in Greece, cannot be established from the documents. Already present in the south-east conch, however, is the fully formed ascetic type that later Byzantine and post-Byzantine painters would repeat in wall painting and on panels for centuries: the bald dome of the head, enlarged eyes, sunken cheeks and thin beard of the golden-mouthed preacher.
(The translation was edited by E. Wilson.)
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