ABSTRACT
The idea that earthly things are reflections of heavenly realities was part of thepackage of Neoplatonic ideas that Byzantium inherited from late antiquity. The idea of the resemblance between earthly and heavenly realms was intensified and given specific content by the biblical tradition and its interpretation by the Greek Fathers. To give a somewhat idiosyncratic example, the sixth-century Christian Topography that has traditionally gone under the name of Cosmas Indicopleustes2
seeks to explain the visible universe in terms of a heavenly prototype. The author rejects the old Ptolemaic notion of the universe as a series of concentric spheres. Instead, he bases his model of heaven and earth on the Tabernacle, the plans for which were revealed to Moses on Mt Sinai, for this is the divinely revealed model of the entire world (τουˆ παντ κσµου τ κµαγειˆον).3 The inhabited world is described as flat and rectangular, something proved to the author of the Christian Topography not only by his own travels, but by the dimensions of the Table of the Shewbread, which is twice as long as it is wide, and surrounded by a border of a palm’s breadth, corresponding to the narrow margin of earth surrounding the ocean. Just as the curtain divides the tabernacle between the outer sanctuary and the Holy of Holies, so the firmament divides the world and the visible heavens from the Kingdom of Heaven that is above the firmament. Although the specific application of such thinking in the Christian Topography is far from typical4 – most educated Byzantines continued to believe in antipodes – the idea that the visible world and its institutions reflected the realities of the invisible, heavenly sphere, was both widespread and long-lived in Byzantium.5 This mirroring of earth and heaven was present equally in
the intellectual world both of the Church and of the court, but its visual expression emerged most prominently through a dialogue between the two. It is thanks to the encounter with imperial expressions of this ideology, both ceremonial and visual, that the Byzantine Church arrived at a uniquely forceful artistic statement of its own continuity with the heavenly hierarchy.
