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Byzantine Sculpture

Works of sculpture on Mount Athos are few in number compared with the wealth of painted decoration seen in Athonite monuments, and this is true generally of churches from the middle and late Byzantine period.
Nonetheless, the visitor is impressed by the marble remains that are sometimes preserved in situ, sometimes re-used, sometimes incorporated as decorative features in the walls, or, in a few cases, simply treasured as mementoes of a bygone age.
The marble decoration is mainly of an architectural nature and is represented by columns, capitals, impost blocks, doorframes, closure panels, phiales, and templa. There are other categories of sculpture, however, such as funerary monuments and figurative reliefs.
These features are more conspicuous in the older Athonite establishments dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries, such as the Protaton in Karyes, the Great Lavra, and Vatopedi, Iviron, Xeropotamou, Docheiariou, and Xenophontos Monasteries.
Quite a number of sculptures belong to the early Christian period, in fact, which means that, when the monasteries were being built, marbles from ruined churches in Macedonia or on the islands were brought to Mount Athos; though it is also possible that they were taken from older Christian monuments on the peninsula itself.
We also find reliefs (mainly grave reliefs) of the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, which either were brought to Athos from the monasteries' metochia (dependencies) elsewhere or came from the townships that flourished on the peninsula in pre-Christian times.
Neither these sculptures nor the ones that were produced especially for the Byzantine monuments on Athos have been studied in their entirety. However, the research that has been done to date indicates that the sculptural decoration in the Athonite churches follows the styles and techniques seen in the religious buildings in the rest of the Byzantine world and reveals links both with Constantinople and with Asia Minor, as also with workshops closer to home, in Macedonia.
Beginning with the architectural sculptures, mention must be made of a double-zone animal capital with rams' heads in the sacristy of the Great Lavra which is dated to the sixth century, as also a similar fifth-century capital re-used in the katholikon of Iviron Monastery. The columns and pedestals in the middle section of the templon in Iviron Monastery also date to the early Christian period, which means that they may have originated from the old Monastery of Clementosos, which is believed to have stood on the same site as the present monastery complex. The four columns in the nave of the old katholikon of Xenophontos Monastery, together with their bases and capitals, were also taken from early Christian monuments. The capitals represent four different types of Corinthian capital of the fourth and fifth centuries AD; one of them was subsequently altered to make it more closely match the decoration of the impost blocks that were added in the middle Byzantine period.
The impost blocks on the capitals in the katholikon of Xenophontos Monastery are contemporary with the church itself, which is believed to have been founded by Hosios Xenophon around the year 1000. They are decorated with a variety of relief motifs, including foliate crosses, palmette tendrils, intersecting circles, rosettes, and firewhirls. The technique is the stiff crisp-carving technique that appeared early in the tenth century in the Church of the Virgin in Lips Monastery in Constantinople (907) and was repeated later in the Church of the Virgin in Hosios Loukas’ Monastery in Phocis and in many sculptures in Asia Minor.
In the middle and late Byzantine period, the architectural decoration of the churches was dominated by the marble templon: tall structures composed of colonnettes supporting a horizontal epistyle, with the intercolumnar spaces below sealed by closure panels. It is a model that appeared towards the end of the early Christian period, though it evolved into its final form during the Macedonian and Comnenian periods.
In a number of Athonite churches the marble templon still survives, either wholly or in part, usually behind the post-Byzantine carved wooden iconostasis. Such templa are found in the Protaton, the katholika of Iviron, Chelandari, Xenophontos, and Docheiariou Monasteries, and also in the Chapel of St Nicholas at Vatopedi and the cemetery church of the Great Lavra. Some templa, like the one from the katholikon of Vatopedi, have been dismantled and their component parts built into the walls of other, unrelated, structures.
One of the earliest Byzantine templa is in the oldest, most venerable church on Mount Athos, the Protaton. The epistyle is ornamented with an undulating tendril with half-palmettes and grapes, and what is known as the 'Asia Minor motif': a row of little arches enclosing acanthus leaves. The closure panels display a motif that was common in the middle Byzantine period, geometrical patterns of lozenges and circles enclosing rosettes and firewhirls.
The reliefs in the Protaton are executed in a linear, rather unsophisticated style that may be connected with workshops in nearby Macedonia. This suggests an earlier dating than the eleventh-century sculptures we know from the katholikon of the Monastery of Hosios Loukas in Phocis, for instance. The templon in the Protaton could thus be dated to the tenth century, possibly around 965, when hosios Athanasios was carrying out work on the monument.
Superior in quality are the architectural sculptures in the katholikon of Vatopedi Monastery, as also its old marble templon, which was dismantled and replaced in 1788 by the present carved wooden iconostasis. Investigations based on the now scattered components, which have been built into the walls of various of the monastery buildings, and the remaining traces on the stylobate, have made it possible to reconstruct the screen on paper. Like the monastery itself, it may be dated with certainty to around the end of the third quarter of the tenth century. These sculptures display a certain eclecticism in their combination of such mediaeval motifs as rosettes and interlacing geometric patterns and older, early Christian ornaments like the superposed lozenges on the closure panels, the intersecting circles on the epistyle, and the eagles at the corners of the capitals.
It is precisely this revival of early Christian motifs, also evident in two other great monuments of this era, Lips Monastery in Constantinople and the Church of the Virgin in Hosios Loukas’ Monastery in Phocis, that places the Vatopedi templon in the context of the artistic renewal that took place in the Macedonian period and links it with the artistic output of the capital and the area within its sphere of influence.
Of the other marble templa that survive in situ, two more deserve special mention, one in the old katholikon of Xenophontos Monastery and the other in the katholikon of Chelandari Monastery. The former was probably added when the church was renovated in 1083 by the Great Drungarios Stephanos, who became a monk and later hegumen under the name of Symeon. It is very sparingly decorated and notable chiefly for the two closure panels with interlacing geometric patterns enclosing crosses, rosettes, and vegetal motifs that recall their earlier counterparts in the Protaton, as also those of the eleventh century on the phiale of the Great Lavra.
The marble templon in the katholikon of Chelandari Monastery was constructed in two stages, the older section being the one in front of the prothesis. It came from the original church of the tenth to early eleventh century, for the undulating tendrils on the colonnettes and the cubic capitals with their low-relief vegetal ornamentation closely resemble those in the Protaton. The other two sections of the templon, in front of the sanctuary and the diaconicon, must belong to the renovations carried out by Milutin in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. This dating is indicated both by the composite cross-section of the colonnettes, which have the decorative motif of a double knot halfway up, and by their cubic capitals, features which are seen in other examples of decorative sculpture in monuments of the late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century. These include the templa in Vlachernes Monastery, Arta (1250), and Porta Panagia (1283), and the ambos in Hagia Sophia, Ohrid (1317), and the Old Metropolis, Veroia (early 14th c.).
Another large category of architectural sculpture comprises the marble doorframes, the finest of which include the one around the north door in the Protaton, some in the katholikon of Vatopedi, the cornice re-used over the west entrance to the present katholikon of Docheiariou, and two lintels in the katholikon of Chelandari, one over the west door of the inner narthex and the other over the central entrance to the nave.
The Protaton doorframe is characterised by the geometric, vegetal, and zoomorphic decoration along the lintel, which is also seen in other early eleventh-century doorframes, such as the one in the Church of Hagioi Anargyroi, Kastoria, for instance. The decoration of the Docheiariou lintel, with its undulating vine scroll and animal population, is of early Christian origin, though the technique is similar to that of a group of unsophisticated tenth- to eleventh-century zoomorphic reliefs with slightly oriental influences that are found in Constantinople and Thessaloniki and on the outer walls of the Old Metropolis in Athens. Of the doorframes in the katholikon of Vatopedi, which are decorated mainly with undulating tendrils or vertical acanthus leaves and a row of bead-and-reel, the lintel over the Imperial Door is particularly interesting. It too is decorated with an undulating tendril, with half-palmettes and little birds pecking at grapes, but the technique used is the champleve process, with orange mastic inlay and strong islamising features. The repetition of this theme in the same technique on the closure panels of the old templon in the katholikon demonstrates the unity of the church's sculptural decoration and helps to date it to the period when the church was founded, between the third and the last quarter of the tenth century. The two lintels in Chelandari Monastery, with their elaborate champleve arabesques, are outstanding examples of the work produced on Mount Athos by a sculpture workshop that was active in the general areas of Thessaly and Macedonia in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, with its base most probably in Thessaloniki.
One special type of structure with marble decoration is the phiale, which is found outside every katholikon on Athos. None of them, however, survives intact from the Byzantine period: even the oldest, that of the Great Lavra, originally made around 1060, had to be rebuilt after an earthquake in the sixteenth century. Closure panels from the original phiale were used in the reconstruction, as were panels from the old templon in the katholikon and a number of other sculptures. No complete reconstruction of the phiale's Byzantine form has yet been produced, but three of the closure panels, which are decorated on one side with crosses under arches in the champleve technique and on the other with zoomorphic subjects in small compartments, may be attributed to the original structure. Two other panels of the phiale’s closure screen, with geometrical patterns of lozenges and circles on one side and heraldic birds and griffins and fighting animals on the other, seem to belong to the old marble templon. Some of the motifs on the closure panels, particularly the zoomorphic subjects, are an eleventh-century echo of the post-Iconoclastic reliefs in the Churches of Skripou and Gregorios Theologos in Thebes, while others, like the one with a champleve foliate cross, represent the same stage of abstraction as the cover slabs from the dome of the Church of the Virgin in Hosios Loukas’ Monastery.
Some closure panels have been re-used in the window-sills in the choirs of the katholika of Iviron and Docheiariou, and another has been built into the wall over the entrance to Xeropotamou. With its rough design and sharp linear relief, the closure panel in the north choir of the katholikon of Iviron exemplifies the unsophisticated linear relief technique of the late tenth and early eleventh century.
The two closure panels in the choirs of the katholikon of Docheiariou are even finer. They depict a spread-eagle and the Ascension of Alexander the Great, or the 'Ascent into the Air', in a highly decorative rendering that recalls silken fabrics of the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is also reminiscent of contemporary gold-work and glazed pottery and, to a certain extent, architectural sculptures in Constantinople, which take their themes from a stock of oriental motifs.
A different trend is reflected in the closure panel built into the wall over the entrance to Xeropotamou, which depicts a peacock with spread wings and tail in a very high, plastic relief. It is, without a doubt, a late tenth-century work from Constantinople, influenced by the sculptures in Lips Monastery and perhaps presaging a similar representation of a peacock on an eleventh-century relief plaque in the wall of St Mark's in Venice.
There are also funerary monuments on Mount Athos, which take the form, common in the Byzantine period, of pseudosarcophagi. These are built tombs in arcosolia with a relief marble slab covering the front, in which the founders of the various monasteries are, or are said to be, buried. The exception is the tomb of Hosios Athanasios in the Great Lavra, which belongs to the group of fitted sarcophagi, but without any relief decoration.
There are two pseudosarcophagi in arcosolia in Vatopedi Monastery, one in the Chapel of St Nicholas (now walled up) and the other in the inner narthex of the katholikon. Recent archaeological investigations have established that the latter is the tomb of the monastery's founders and took shape gradually between the early eleventh and the fourteenth century. It is a composite funeral structure, comprising an underground built cist, in which the deceased were laid, and a pseudosarcophagus at ground level, i.e. a shrine with its three sides built and its front closing with a marble panel, in which the relics were placed in due course. From this point of view, the tomb of the founders of Vatopedi was particularly important for monasterial funerary customs in the middle Byzantine period, because the creation of a ground-level shrine, which probably had a little window in the cover, was obviously intended to facilitate the veneration of the relics. The marble front of the pseudosarcophagus was decorated with an arcade enclosing a foliate cross and cypresses, a common theme on middle and late Byzantine sarcophagi, with allusions to Paradise. On the basis of the simple decoration and low relief, this slab belongs with a series of pseudosarcophagi dated to the mid-eleventh century.
The decoration of the cover of a pseudosarcophagus now in the courtyard of Pantokrator Monastery is similar, though more elaborate. The motifs and their execution suggest a fourteenth-century dating, which is supported by the tradition linking this pseudosarcophagus with the founders of the monastery.
Figurative sculpture on Mount Athos, as in the rest of the Byzantine world, has never been especially favoured. The only example is a small icon of St Demetrios built into the wall of the katholikon of Xeropotamou, and probably brought here from Constantinople. The icon is characterised by simplicity, though its execution is also highly expressive, and it is dated to the twelfth century.
Finally, from the other categories of sculpture, mention must be made of two portable marble holy-water phiales, one from the late tenth or early eleventh century in Vatopedi and the other from the fourteenth century in the Monastery of Pantokrator. They are both hemispherical bowls decorated with crosses, like other Byzantine marble holy-water phiales and baptismal fonts.

Theocharis N. Pazaras

Bibliography: Brockhaus 1924, pp. 38ff., figs. 7-9. Brehier 1940, pp. 48ff. Orlandos 1953, pp. 83ff., figs. 1-5. Orlandos 1955-6, pp. 105ff., figs. 1, 2. Lange 1964, no. 23, pp. 79-80. Nenadovic 1974, p. 137, fig. 48. Bouras 1975-6, pp. 85ff., pl. 44-51. Grabar 1976, pp. 68-9, pl. XXXIX, XL. Mylonas 1979, p. 146 n. 11, figs. 3-4, 10-11. Boura 1980, p. 29, fig. 29. Mylonas 1981, pp. 549-50, figs. 6-8. Mylonas 1985, p. 67, figs. 5-8. Mylonas 1986, pp. 11ff., figs. 3-4. Pazaras 1987, pp. 159ff., figs. 7-9. Pazaras 1987-8, pp. 44ff., figs. 44-45, 48-49. Pazaras 1988, no. 16, pp. 27, 63, 64, 122, 161, pl. 13a; no. 17, pp. 28, 72, 128, 129, 164, pl. 13a; no. 18, pp. 28, 81, 103, 119, 131, pl. 14; no. 19, pp. 28, 29, 72, 75, 81, 112, 130, 131, 158, 164, pl. 15a; no. 20, pp. 29, 73, 154, 155, pl. 15a. Pazaras 1993, pp. 147ff., figs. 1a-a, 16. Pazaras 1994, pp. 407ff., figs. 1-17, drawings 1-6. Pazaras 1995 (1), pp. 15ff., figs. 1-18.

Exhibits per Monastery
Chronological Classification

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Byzantine Sculpture

	Works of sculpture on Mount Athos are few in number compared with the wealth of painted decoration seen in Athonite monuments, and this is true generally of churches from the middle and late Byzantine period. Nonetheless, the visitor is impressed by the marble remains that are sometimes preserved in situ, sometimes re-used, sometimes incorporated as decorative features in the walls, or, in a few cases, simply treasured as mementoes of a bygone age. The marble decoration is mainly of an architectural nature and is represented by columns, capitals, impost blocks, doorframes, closure panels, phiales, and templa. There are other categories of sculpture, however, such as funerary monuments and figurative reliefs. These features are more conspicuous in the older Athonite establishments dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries, such as the Protaton in Karyes, the Great Lavra, and Vatopedi, Iviron, Xeropotamou, Docheiariou, and Xenophontos Monasteries. Quite a number of sculptures belong to the early Christian period, in fact, which means that, when the monasteries were being built, marbles from ruined churches in Macedonia or on the islands were brought to Mount Athos; though it is also possible that they were taken from older Christian monuments on the peninsula itself. We also find reliefs (mainly grave reliefs) of the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, which either were brought to Athos from the monasteries' metochia (dependencies) elsewhere or came from the townships that flourished on the peninsula in pre-Christian times. Neither these sculptures nor the ones that were produced especially for the Byzantine monuments on Athos have been studied in their entirety. However, the research that has been done to date indicates that the sculptural decoration in the Athonite churches follows the styles and techniques seen in the religious buildings in the rest of the Byzantine world and reveals links both with Constantinople and with Asia Minor, as also with workshops closer to home, in Macedonia. Beginning with the architectural sculptures, mention must be made of a double-zone animal capital with rams' heads in the sacristy of the Great Lavra which is dated to the sixth century, as also a similar fifth-century capital re-used in the katholikon of Iviron Monastery. The columns and pedestals in the middle section of the templon in Iviron Monastery also date to the early Christian period, which means that they may have originated from the old Monastery of Clementosos, which is believed to have stood on the same site as the present monastery complex. The four columns in the nave of the old katholikon of Xenophontos Monastery, together with their bases and capitals, were also taken from early Christian monuments. The capitals represent four different types of Corinthian capital of the fourth and fifth centuries AD; one of them was subsequently altered to make it more closely match the decoration of the impost blocks that were added in the middle Byzantine period. The impost blocks on the capitals in the katholikon of Xenophontos Monastery are contemporary with the church itself, which is believed to have been founded by Hosios Xenophon around the year 1000. They are decorated with a variety of relief motifs, including foliate crosses, palmette tendrils, intersecting circles, rosettes, and firewhirls. The technique is the stiff crisp-carving technique that appeared early in the tenth century in the Church of the Virgin in Lips Monastery in Constantinople (907) and was repeated later in the Church of the Virgin in Hosios Loukas’ Monastery in Phocis and in many sculptures in Asia Minor. In the middle and late Byzantine period, the architectural decoration of the churches was dominated by the marble templon: tall structures composed of colonnettes supporting a horizontal epistyle, with the intercolumnar spaces below sealed by closure panels. It is a model that appeared towards the end of the early Christian period, though it evolved into its final form during the Macedonian and Comnenian periods. In a number of Athonite churches the marble templon still survives, either wholly or in part, usually behind the post-Byzantine carved wooden iconostasis. Such templa are found in the Protaton, the katholika of Iviron, Chelandari, Xenophontos, and Docheiariou Monasteries, and also in the Chapel of St Nicholas at Vatopedi and the cemetery church of the Great Lavra. Some templa, like the one from the katholikon of Vatopedi, have been dismantled and their component parts built into the walls of other, unrelated, structures. One of the earliest Byzantine templa is in the oldest, most venerable church on Mount Athos, the Protaton. The epistyle is ornamented with an undulating tendril with half-palmettes and grapes, and what is known as the 'Asia Minor motif': a row of little arches enclosing acanthus leaves. The closure panels display a motif that was common in the middle Byzantine period, geometrical patterns of lozenges and circles enclosing rosettes and firewhirls. The reliefs in the Protaton are executed in a linear, rather unsophisticated style that may be connected with workshops in nearby Macedonia. This suggests an earlier dating than the eleventh-century sculptures we know from the katholikon of the Monastery of Hosios Loukas in Phocis, for instance. The templon in the Protaton could thus be dated to the tenth century, possibly around 965, when hosios Athanasios was carrying out work on the monument. Superior in quality are the architectural sculptures in the katholikon of Vatopedi Monastery, as also its old marble templon, which was dismantled and replaced in 1788 by the present carved wooden iconostasis. Investigations based on the now scattered components, which have been built into the walls of various of the monastery buildings, and the remaining traces on the stylobate, have made it possible to reconstruct the screen on paper. Like the monastery itself, it may be dated with certainty to around the end of the third quarter of the tenth century. These sculptures display a certain eclecticism in their combination of such mediaeval motifs as rosettes and interlacing geometric patterns and older, early Christian ornaments like the superposed lozenges on the closure panels, the intersecting circles on the epistyle, and the eagles at the corners of the capitals. It is precisely this revival of early Christian motifs, also evident in two other great monuments of this era, Lips Monastery in Constantinople and the Church of the Virgin in Hosios Loukas’ Monastery in Phocis, that places the Vatopedi templon in the context of the artistic renewal that took place in the Macedonian period and links it with the artistic output of the capital and the area within its sphere of influence. Of the other marble templa that survive in situ, two more deserve special mention, one in the old katholikon of Xenophontos Monastery and the other in the katholikon of Chelandari Monastery. The former was probably added when the church was renovated in 1083 by the Great Drungarios Stephanos, who became a monk and later hegumen under the name of Symeon. It is very sparingly decorated and notable chiefly for the two closure panels with interlacing geometric patterns enclosing crosses, rosettes, and vegetal motifs that recall their earlier counterparts in the Protaton, as also those of the eleventh century on the phiale of the Great Lavra. The marble templon in the katholikon of Chelandari Monastery was constructed in two stages, the older section being the one in front of the prothesis. It came from the original church of the tenth to early eleventh century, for the undulating tendrils on the colonnettes and the cubic capitals with their low-relief vegetal ornamentation closely resemble those in the Protaton. The other two sections of the templon, in front of the sanctuary and the diaconicon, must belong to the renovations carried out by Milutin in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. This dating is indicated both by the composite cross-section of the colonnettes, which have the decorative motif of a double knot halfway up, and by their cubic capitals, features which are seen in other examples of decorative sculpture in monuments of the late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century. These include the templa in Vlachernes Monastery, Arta (1250), and Porta Panagia (1283), and the ambos in Hagia Sophia, Ohrid (1317), and the Old Metropolis, Veroia (early 14th c.). Another large category of architectural sculpture comprises the marble doorframes, the finest of which include the one around the north door in the Protaton, some in the katholikon of Vatopedi, the cornice re-used over the west entrance to the present katholikon of Docheiariou, and two lintels in the katholikon of Chelandari, one over the west door of the inner narthex and the other over the central entrance to the nave. The Protaton doorframe is characterised by the geometric, vegetal, and zoomorphic decoration along the lintel, which is also seen in other early eleventh-century doorframes, such as the one in the Church of Hagioi Anargyroi, Kastoria, for instance. The decoration of the Docheiariou lintel, with its undulating vine scroll and animal population, is of early Christian origin, though the technique is similar to that of a group of unsophisticated tenth- to eleventh-century zoomorphic reliefs with slightly oriental influences that are found in Constantinople and Thessaloniki and on the outer walls of the Old Metropolis in Athens. Of the doorframes in the katholikon of Vatopedi, which are decorated mainly with undulating tendrils or vertical acanthus leaves and a row of bead-and-reel, the lintel over the Imperial Door is particularly interesting. It too is decorated with an undulating tendril, with half-palmettes and little birds pecking at grapes, but the technique used is the champleve process, with orange mastic inlay and strong islamising features. The repetition of this theme in the same technique on the closure panels of the old templon in the katholikon demonstrates the unity of the church's sculptural decoration and helps to date it to the period when the church was founded, between the third and the last quarter of the tenth century. The two lintels in Chelandari Monastery, with their elaborate champleve arabesques, are outstanding examples of the work produced on Mount Athos by a sculpture workshop that was active in the general areas of Thessaly and Macedonia in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, with its base most probably in Thessaloniki. One special type of structure with marble decoration is the phiale, which is found outside every katholikon on Athos. None of them, however, survives intact from the Byzantine period: even the oldest, that of the Great Lavra, originally made around 1060, had to be rebuilt after an earthquake in the sixteenth century. Closure panels from the original phiale were used in the reconstruction, as were panels from the old templon in the katholikon and a number of other sculptures. No complete reconstruction of the phiale's Byzantine form has yet been produced, but three of the closure panels, which are decorated on one side with crosses under arches in the champleve technique and on the other with zoomorphic subjects in small compartments, may be attributed to the original structure. Two other panels of the phiale’s closure screen, with geometrical patterns of lozenges and circles on one side and heraldic birds and griffins and fighting animals on the other, seem to belong to the old marble templon. Some of the motifs on the closure panels, particularly the zoomorphic subjects, are an eleventh-century echo of the post-Iconoclastic reliefs in the Churches of Skripou and Gregorios Theologos in Thebes, while others, like the one with a champleve foliate cross, represent the same stage of abstraction as the cover slabs from the dome of the Church of the Virgin in Hosios Loukas’ Monastery. Some closure panels have been re-used in the window-sills in the choirs of the katholika of Iviron and Docheiariou, and another has been built into the wall over the entrance to Xeropotamou. With its rough design and sharp linear relief, the closure panel in the north choir of the katholikon of Iviron exemplifies the unsophisticated linear relief technique of the late tenth and early eleventh century. The two closure panels in the choirs of the katholikon of Docheiariou are even finer. They depict a spread-eagle and the Ascension of Alexander the Great, or the 'Ascent into the Air', in a highly decorative rendering that recalls silken fabrics of the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is also reminiscent of contemporary gold-work and glazed pottery and, to a certain extent, architectural sculptures in Constantinople, which take their themes from a stock of oriental motifs. A different trend is reflected in the closure panel built into the wall over the entrance to Xeropotamou, which depicts a peacock with spread wings and tail in a very high, plastic relief. It is, without a doubt, a late tenth-century work from Constantinople, influenced by the sculptures in Lips Monastery and perhaps presaging a similar representation of a peacock on an eleventh-century relief plaque in the wall of St Mark's in Venice. There are also funerary monuments on Mount Athos, which take the form, common in the Byzantine period, of pseudosarcophagi. These are built tombs in arcosolia with a relief marble slab covering the front, in which the founders of the various monasteries are, or are said to be, buried. The exception is the tomb of Hosios Athanasios in the Great Lavra, which belongs to the group of fitted sarcophagi, but without any relief decoration. There are two pseudosarcophagi in arcosolia in Vatopedi Monastery, one in the Chapel of St Nicholas (now walled up) and the other in the inner narthex of the katholikon. Recent archaeological investigations have established that the latter is the tomb of the monastery's founders and took shape gradually between the early eleventh and the fourteenth century. It is a composite funeral structure, comprising an underground built cist, in which the deceased were laid, and a pseudosarcophagus at ground level, i.e. a shrine with its three sides built and its front closing with a marble panel, in which the relics were placed in due course. From this point of view, the tomb of the founders of Vatopedi was particularly important for monasterial funerary customs in the middle Byzantine period, because the creation of a ground-level shrine, which probably had a little window in the cover, was obviously intended to facilitate the veneration of the relics. The marble front of the pseudosarcophagus was decorated with an arcade enclosing a foliate cross and cypresses, a common theme on middle and late Byzantine sarcophagi, with allusions to Paradise. On the basis of the simple decoration and low relief, this slab belongs with a series of pseudosarcophagi dated to the mid-eleventh century. The decoration of the cover of a pseudosarcophagus now in the courtyard of Pantokrator Monastery is similar, though more elaborate. The motifs and their execution suggest a fourteenth-century dating, which is supported by the tradition linking this pseudosarcophagus with the founders of the monastery. Figurative sculpture on Mount Athos, as in the rest of the Byzantine world, has never been especially favoured. The only example is a small icon of St Demetrios built into the wall of the katholikon of Xeropotamou, and probably brought here from Constantinople. The icon is characterised by simplicity, though its execution is also highly expressive, and it is dated to the twelfth century. Finally, from the other categories of sculpture, mention must be made of two portable marble holy-water phiales, one from the late tenth or early eleventh century in Vatopedi and the other from the fourteenth century in the Monastery of Pantokrator. They are both hemispherical bowls decorated with crosses, like other Byzantine marble holy-water phiales and baptismal fonts. Theocharis N. Pazaras Bibliography: Brockhaus 1924, pp. 38ff., figs. 7-9. Brehier 1940, pp. 48ff. Orlandos 1953, pp. 83ff., figs. 1-5. Orlandos 1955-6, pp. 105ff., figs. 1, 2. Lange 1964, no. 23, pp. 79-80. Nenadovic 1974, p. 137, fig. 48. Bouras 1975-6, pp. 85ff., pl. 44-51. Grabar 1976, pp. 68-9, pl. XXXIX, XL. Mylonas 1979, p. 146 n. 11, figs. 3-4, 10-11. Boura 1980, p. 29, fig. 29. Mylonas 1981, pp. 549-50, figs. 6-8. Mylonas 1985, p. 67, figs. 5-8. Mylonas 1986, pp. 11ff., figs. 3-4. Pazaras 1987, pp. 159ff., figs. 7-9. Pazaras 1987-8, pp. 44ff., figs. 44-45, 48-49. Pazaras 1988, no. 16, pp. 27, 63, 64, 122, 161, pl. 13a; no. 17, pp. 28, 72, 128, 129, 164, pl. 13a; no. 18, pp. 28, 81, 103, 119, 131, pl. 14; no. 19, pp. 28, 29, 72, 75, 81, 112, 130, 131, 158, 164, pl. 15a; no. 20, pp. 29, 73, 154, 155, pl. 15a. Pazaras 1993, pp. 147ff., figs. 1a-a, 16. Pazaras 1994, pp. 407ff., figs. 1-17, drawings 1-6. Pazaras 1995 (1), pp. 15ff., figs. 1-18.
	Exhibits per Monastery Chronological Classification