Peacocks

The marble panels on the iconostasis in the Cathedral at Torcello are carved with peacocks drinking from the fountain of life.

See Notebook M2 p.133 where Ruskin cites Lindsay on peacock imagery and Notebook M2 p.129 where Ruskin asserts, mistakenly, that peacocks are purely Byzantine.

Lindsay (1847) I p.xxiii, in the table of symbols includes:

The Resurrection - by the phoenix, and the peacock, which loses its rich plumage in winter and recovers it is spring.

In the discussion of Byzantine symbolism at Ravenna in Lindsay (1847) I p.103, the following appears:

The bas-reliefs of the ancient ambones of the cathedral, now incrusted into the wall behind the choir, hardly deserve mention as works of art, but are curious as exhibiting, in distinct rows, the fish, the dove, the lamb, the stag, the peacock, &c - “the whole sacred menagerie,” as Mr. Hope calls it, of Symbolism...

At Works, 9.288 Ruskin adds: ‘the whole spirit and power of [the] peacock is in those eyes of the tail’.

At Works, 9.429 Ruskin writes:

I believe peacocks to be purely Byzantine

See also Notebook M2 p.129, where Ruskin inserted the same form of words about the purely Byzantine nature of peacock images. There clearly are peacocks in contexts which might be seen as Byzantine, in San Vitale in Ravenna, in the Duomo at Torcello, in the mosaic pavement of Murano, and in the decoration of St. Mark’s in Venice. However Ruskin is wrong in his assertion that they are exclusively, or even originally Byzantine. The peacock in the third century catacomb of Priscilla in Rome is an early example (for a photograph see here) which predates the Eastern Empire. There is another example in the Romanesque (in the modern sense which distinguishes Romanesque and Byzantine) porch of the Cathedral in San Rufino in Assisi:

Assisi, San Rufino, Porch
Assisi, San Rufino, Porch

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