Pure Pleasure: Peacocks

Villa of Poppaea, 1st C.

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It is time for pleasure, and few things are more pleasurable than peacocks.

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S.ta Costanza, Rome, 4th C.

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Dioscorides manuscript of Anicia Juliana, 6th C.

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Rotunda, Thessalonike, 4th C.

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I saw a peacock with a fiery tail

I saw a blazing comet drop down hail

I saw a cloud with ivy cirlced round

I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground

I saw a pismire swallow up a whale

I saw a raging sea brim full of ale

I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep

I saw a well full of men's tears that weep

I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire

I saw a house as big as the moon and higher

I saw the sun even in the midst of night

I saw the Man that saw this wondrous sight.

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Rotunda, Thessalonike, 4th C.

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Identification  misplaced.

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Mark you how the peacock's eye
Winks away its ring of green,
Barter'd for an azure dye.
And the piece that's like a bean,
The pupil, plays its liquid jet
To win a look of violet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Al Jazari's model for a drinking fountain, Topkapi Museum, ca. 1000?

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Benozzo Gozzolo, Medici Chapel, Florence, 1460

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Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks

Came striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry -- the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire

Turning as the tails of the peacocks

Turned in the loud fire

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was is a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Wallace Stevens

A Frosting of Peacocks

Anicia Juliana--or Juliana Anicia, depending on your source-was a petite woman, pretty when a girl, masses of hair determinedly controlled, immaculately groomed but not ostentatiously dressed (dressed as a Roman: they weren't Byzantines yet). Her (probable) portrait in the Metropolitan suggests this, suggests that the young people could tease her out of her firmness. Her other surviving portrait suggests very little. The early 500s were not a good time to be an independent-minded woman in Constantinople--look at how Theodora was traduced-but Anicia Juliana had enough money to do whatever she wanted.

What she wanted to do by the time she was a grandmother was to rebuild Solomon's Temple, and she did in the three years from 524-527. Agios Polyeuktos was privileged as to be the guest of honor because his church was on her property. He was a soldier, martyred in 255, and the church claimed a piece of his skull. That was pretty much it, unless she knew more about him than we do. Juliana Anicia's great-grandmother, Empress Eudocia (401-440), had built the first Polyeuktos about seventy-five years earlier. Eudocia was a poet--this will be relevant in a moment--who had married Theodosios II, the Eastern Emperor. Eudocia's daughter, Licinia Eudocia (422-462), married the Western Emperor, Valentinius III (371-392), son of Galla Placidia who herself built a wondrous building.

Bear with me on the names a little longer Licinia Eudocia's daughter Placidia married Juliana Anicia's father, Olybrius. Olybrius had been Emperor of the West for six months in 472. Juliana Anicia's husband was a distinguished German general, Areobindus, who refused an offer of the crown in the 512 riots. She must have been furious. Their son, also an Olybrius, married the niece--or daughter--of the Emperor Anastasios (591-518). Always so close and yet never empress.

If you drew lines north-south and east-west across Constantinople, they would intersect at the site of Agios Polyeuktos, on the grounds of Anicia Juliana's estate that had earlier belonged to Eudocia. The excavations of the 1960s have mostly been reburied, the finds are mostly in storage in the Istanbul museum, though if you make it across the lanes of traffic, occasional columns and bits of carving show through the dust. Five hundred years after Anicia Juliana, her church was the site on an imperial processional route where the emperor would stop to get a new candle on Easter Monday.

Her church was worth more attention than a candle. It must have been inexpressively beautiful, although she tried to express it with seventy-six lines of hexameters carved around the edges, frost-white against a peacock blue background. Parts of seven lines survive, but someone in the tenth century copied down the whole poem which now lives in Heidelberg. This is her voice:

. . . glittering beyond description with the brightness of the sun on both sides! On either side of the central nave, columns standing upon sturdy columns support the rays of a golden roof. on both sides recesses hollowed out in arches have given birth to the ever-revolving light of the moon. The walls . . . have recalled to life in measureless paths marvellous meadows of precious materials, whose brightness nature, flowering in the deep depths of the rock, has concealed and guarded for the house of God, to be the gift of Juliana . .

That is, in fact, remarkably close to the remnants that were found--niches frosted with peacocks with green glass eyes, their beaks holding lamps on gold chains (there would have been at least thirty of these); walls and columns frosted with grape vines--leaves and grapes you could pick, palm trees dripping with dates, flowers, crosses, vases, leaves, eggs-and-leafy-darts, beads-and-reels, monograms, hallucinatory plants, apostles; confronted peacocks under the arches; capitals overspun with networks of basketry and vines and fabric and acanthus leaves; wall skirting inlaid with amethyst, mother-of-pearl, colored glass, colored marble. Much of this carving was backed with peacock blue--never an inexpensive color and one wonders where it came from. Nearly all the imagery is taken from passages in Kings and Ezekiel in the Old Testament that describe the Temple of Solomon, as are the dimensions. With one exception: where the Old Testament called for cherubim, Juliana Anicia called for peacocks, the birds of Empresses.

Juliana Anicia's temple had mosaics on the walls and apse and floor, acres of them--white roses against black and red, and saints, but in the eighth century, mean-spirited doers of God's will destroyed the saints. And the columns: in addition to the pillars frosted with carvings, there were columns covered with inlay, long hexagonals set with squares of amethyst, triangles and narrow trapezoids of green glass. These hexagonals were interspersed with more squares of amethyst, the hexagonals and squares set into a network of narrow gold glass strips.

Agios Polyeuktos became a quarry at some point in its history. The Palaiologoi retrieved pieces of a screen for their church of the Pantokrator (Zeyrek Cami), and later on the Turks incorporated pieces in their own buildings. More pieces of Anicia Juliana's temple have been identified in Barcelona and Aquileia. And at San Marco in Venice. The picture above is Ruskin's study of the south-west corner, the corner you come to from the water, showing two of the three palm leaf and basketry capitals, and one of the two frosted pillars the Venetians brought from Constantinople, before or during or after 1204. The Venetians may not have known that Anicia Juliana had built Solomon's Temple, but when they rebuilt San Marco in the thirteenth century--making it unrecognizeable to anyone from the twelth--they were conscientiously rebuilding Solomon's Temple with what they understood to be the Old Testament measurements.Solomon's Temple had two pillars before the entrance (I Kings 7:13-22), and Anicia Juliana's pillars were placed outside the main entrance of San Marco. The Venetians thought they were Solomon's.

Juliana Anicia lived from 463 to about 528. After her temple was completed, there was little need for her to stay. She fortunately never saw Justinian's riposte.

The Owls of Constantinople

Here are two small owls from Constantinople.

The first, soft watercolor owl was made for a woman-- the wealthiest woman in the world in her day-- Anicia Juliana, daughter of an emperor of Rome, bright, nervy, possibly jealous because she was not empress, and builder of Agios Polyeuktos (524-527), the largest and most magnificent church ever built, until Justinian, Emperor of the Romans, jealous of her accomplishments and wealth started building Agia Sophia five years later.

This little owl comes from a page of birds , one of 498 miniatures in a book on medicine and science given to her by the congregation of a church she built in 512 (although she must have actually paid for the manuscript). The manuscript is called the Vienna Dioscorides now, though what she called it is anybody's guess. Between Anicia Juliana and Vienna, the manuscript was treasured by everyone who touched it and became a model to be copied. It stayed in Constantinople under a variety of owners, mostly non-Greek, until bought by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and brought to Vienna.

The other owl was drawn in about 1438 by the eight-year old Mehmed, son of Murad II, Sultan of Rum, the latest to gnaw away at Justinian's empire. He was probably living in Adrianople at the time, but the manuscript came with him to Constantinople in 1453, a page in a book of school exercises . He might have owned Anicia Juliana's book, or not: a hundred years later it belonged to the Jewish doctor of his great-grandson.

Something else you see on that page are his very early lessons in writing Turkish in the Arabic script which the Turks used until 1928. And at the top of the page, the twelve-year old Mehmed practiced the elements of his signature as sultan, his tugra, because his father opted out of ruling and made him sultan for four years.

Also bright, also nervy, Mehmed became sultan for good in February 1451, just before his twenty-first birthday, and on 29 May 1453 he rode into Anicia Juliana's city as sole possessor. Her church had long been rubble: it had been abandoned and was in use as a stone quarry before the Western Christians took possession in 1204.