Shaping Byzantine Colors: Print Technologies and the Transformation of Art Historical Narratives (19th–early 20th c.)

From the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, Western engagement with Byzantine art emerged as a complex phenomenon of rediscovery, involving a wide array of personalities, institutions, and contexts. This reappraisal was profoundly conditioned by transformations in the publishing industry, particularly the development of such new color-reproduction techniques as chromolithography. For the first time, these technologies granted a wider audience access to the polychrome nature of Byzantine monuments and artworks, visual qualities previously confined to verbal descriptions that could not be communicated by earlier black-and-white engraving techniques. This new access, however, was mediated by two forces: the technical limitations of color printing, such as restricted palettes and unstable inks, and the persistence of an intellectual framework informed by classical and Renaissance aesthetic canons and by pervasive Orientalist perspectives. Together, these factors fostered an image of Byzantine aesthetic culture as fundamentally “coloristic” and anti-classical, defined by vivid chromatic contrasts and the primacy of decoration over subject. This image underwent continuous revisions over time. As the vocabulary of art history was progressively refined through the methodological innovations of German-Austrian Kunstwissenschaft, debates over reproduction fidelity, hierarchies of media, and the epistemic status of color repositioned the chromatic component as a constitutive principle of form, materiality, and liturgical space. Through comparative analysis of diverse publications, from travelogues to specialist corpora, this paper reconstructs the transformation of the narrative of Byzantium as a “civilization of color”. It assesses the impact of this narrative on the historical evaluation of Byzantine artistic production and traces its enduring consequences.