ABSTRACT
Honouring Henry Maguire’s interest in Byzantine development of ancient non-figural patterns, and how they keep or gain the status of signs, this chapter also addresses his eagerness to modify the persistent view of Byzantine art as a change-resistant expression of distance from worldly things.
The soft and evanescent rose has a four-part cipher descending from Roman usage, with a chiastic calyx between the petals. Its multiple variations allow a single blossom to stand for many, alone or represented in baskets, bowls, panels, or trellis-like grids. This popular motif appears in early Byzantine jewellery, textiles, mosaic pavements and the mosaic canopies of window embrasures in the Rotunda at Thessaloniki. Its four-part symmetry ambivalently emphasizes or else suppresses cruciform representations. During the period of the iconoclastic controversy the cruciform calyx is usually rotated toward an upright orientation; the petals can become outlines framing other leaf or flower motifs. Other cruciform examples attest to the continued use of this adaptable sign to address, with the poignancy of an implied challenge, the principle of earthly transience.
