6 EMPRESS ZOE & THE CROSS
Here’s a picture Joy Harvey sent me of Empress Zoe (978-1050) waving from the Boukoleon. How do we know it’s the Boukoleon? Because of the ships. That’s the row of portals right there. Those triangles on top are sitting on the lintels, over the arches I’m drawing these days, forgetting to breathe, trying to get it right. In the old days, the arches didn’t even show.
Here is French artist Antoine Helbert’s magnificent re-imagining of the Boukoleon in its heyday. Our portals show behind the ship at left. A splendid CGI reconstruction of the Boukoleon by the artist of Byzantium1200.com.tr shows flat grey marble around pillar and lion details. I’d include it here but he specifically asks that nobody do that. Both artists are working with Byzantine scholars, and their reconstructions are masterful. If there was any data on the color and texture of the Boukoleon facade I’m sure they would include it. From my years of wandering the Palace ruin, observing the marble chunks littering the weeds at the highway, I think the facade of the Boukoleon was highly decorated. I’ve seen at least eleven colors of marble. The Byzantines never did anything that wasn’t ornamented to the nth degree.
This vivid recreation of a palace by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema is close to the mark. I thought I was new to his work, but guess again, like everyone else in Western Civilization I’ve grown up on his imagery in the movies. All that Cecil B. DeMille Bible stuff, Spartacus, Gladiator, Rome and everything else of antiquity– full of Sir Lawrence’s imagery. This painting, Spring, was done around 1900. Pure speculation, but…Check out that layout!– a row of high stately portals on the right, a small arch to the front over a doorway, right where there’s the ghost of one in the existing wall, and behind those pillars at the left, an enormous arch. Notice the pophyry and malachite– those pillars in the back are definitely green. A pillar lying in the weeds inside the ruin is malachite and the thickness reaches above my knees. I wonder if Sir Lawrence visited the Boukoleon after the railroad ran through it in 1873? Before the highway, when there was still some neoclassical marble clinging above the portals and the front was a lagoon…
Another of his paintings, Hero, done in 1898, is also evocative of the Boukoleon. Nobody rendered the ancient world like Sir Lawrence, and I’m grateful, he helps me. Thanks to all these artists and my own observation, I have a vivid idea of what this place looked like, with translucent sheets of alabaster, giant lions, saffron and speckled green and amber stone, purple pophyry and malachite and white marble fitted together with a lo-rez ziggurat cut, as we can still see in the arches over the doors of various mosques and in Topkapi Palace.
Things like this play through my mind while I’m drawing the precious, dessicated old dragon that the Boukoleon has become. They play through all right, and I don’t notice them go, because I’m mired in ghastly perspective problems like this one, today. That damn pencil got me into it, and I had to use it to get me out.
Actually it’s a lovely pencil, the one I borrowed from the bus driver. I never saw him again although I look for him every day. He’s going to have to fight me for this pencil. It’s become a talisman. It’s so long and sharp. It’s much longer than my drafting pens, so long that I can hold it up to line up various points on the drawing and find the perspective. Which DOES NOT match the spiffy pencil horizontal lines I drew last week when the world was young and I started this project.
Just for laughs, before I started inking it in from scratch, I checked the topmost right point of the Right Portal, using the Cross Method. I held the pencil up, level, and Mah Gawd, it was level with…the inner arch of the Left Portal? This CANNOT BE!! It’s much higher than that…isn’t it? I checked the other side. Level with that Center Portal top inner right corner? Whaaa? ?????The black inner top right corner? Level with that point HALFWAY DOWN the Center…oh, this can’t be right… Well thank God for that pencil. I drew and I drew, and I knew the proportions were all wrong, yet I checked them over and over again and… THE CROSS NEVER LIES. See? The blue lines are my faulty perspective lines. The red lines are the Cross.
This is EXACTLY the correct size, position and perspective of the Right Portal. I’m still wrestling with the bottom. It seems too steeply slanted, so I left it for tomorrow when I am not tired. Because I felt like I’d climbed all Seven Hills. I had to pack up and hike down to the tea garden, drink some water, shake my hand and my head around. I came back, unpacked, measured, measured, measured some more, took a big deep breath, and laid it in with the pen. After carving that thing out in pencil against all my drawing instincts, it felt like coloring in a book. I made a mental note: When the drawing is nearly done, blacken all the shadows to where they are at around 5 PM.
The drawing was right. The world was beautiful. I noticed that it had gotten really windy, almost cold. Hurrying down along the CIty Walls, I had to hold my hat on. Across the highway, the water was deep teal with ripped whitecaps and seagulls rioting all over the surface. Through the Stable Gate, up the hill and down, stopped at the Spice Bazaar on the way home for olives and cheese and cashews. Oh how I dreaded climbing the hill to my apartment, so I decided that that was going to happen to someone else: the person I was at that moment got to look at the minarets of the Yeni Mosque. The tram was jammed, but I did indeed turn into someone else, someone who didn’t care that much about a little old hill, for coming across the Galata Bridge, the light turned to that fairy color between pink and blue, the sea whitening under the fading sky.