Templon - Evolution

Evolution

The templon gradually replaced all other forms of chancel barriers in Byzantine churches in the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries except in Cappadocia. As late as the 10th century, a simple wooden chancel barrier separated the apse from the nave in the rock-cut churches, though by the late 11th century, the templon had become standard. This may have been because of the veneration and imitation of the Great Church Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, though the columnar form of chancel barrier does predate Hagia Sophia.

The templon began to change forms to the medieval templon with the attachment of icons and painted scenes to the architrave. Some of the best preserved of these images are from the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mt. Sinai. The late 12th-century templon beam shows twelve canonical feast scenes, with the Deesis (Christ enthroned, flanked by Mary and St. John the Baptist) located in the middle between the Transfiguration and the Raising of Lazarus, linking the scene of Lazarus with the Holy Week images according to liturgical practice. Several epistyles of this form have been excavated throughout the empire, none earlier than the 12th century, indicating a change from busts on the architrave to scenic decoration. This new scenic style is representative of the increasing liturgification in Byzantine representational art after iconoclasm.

During most of the Middle Byzantine period, the space between the colonnettes was not filled with icons but with curtains. Nicholaos Andidorum describes in his Protheoria "the shutting of the doors and the closing of the curtain over them". The most widespread image on the medieval templon seems to have been the Deesis. Its popularity arose from not only its simplicity and elegance, suggesting the efficacy of prayer and the threat of the Last Judgment, but also because it could be easily adapted to the patron’s tastes with the addition of secondary scenes and characters, as in the Monastery at St. Catherine’s where scenes from the life of St Eustratios appear on either side of the Deesis on a templon beam. Proskynetaria (large icons) also played a major part in the decoration of the medieval templon, either as monumental images placed on the piers flanking the templon or as portable images in front of the screen. Proskynetaria of both these types still exist in Cyprus, from Lagoudera, now in the Archbishop’s Palace in Nicosia, and in St Neophytos.

Sometime between the 11th and 14th centuries, icons and proskynetaria began to be placed in the intercolumnar openings on the templon. After the reconquest in 1261, carving on the medieval templon approached sculpture in the round. From this period, the first wood-carved templa, or iconostases, were produced. They for most part had a fixed program of icon decoration with three levels: the Local, the Deesis, and the Festival tiers. Early Russian versions were at chest height, and called "thoraxis" in Greek. The full height iconostasis became standard in the 15th century, and probably owes more to 14th-century Hesychast mysticism and the wood-carving genius of the Russians than anything else. The first ceiling-high, five-leveled Russian iconostasis was designed for the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow Kremlin by Theophanes the Greek in 1405, and soon copied by his assistant Andrey Rublyov in the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir in 1408.