Page 125 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter II
which they live. They have had a formative influence on contemporary history and cul- ture even though – or perhaps precisely because – that was not their intention.”3
However, whether painters, artists, philosophers or theologians, in Byzantine society, these “quietists” were not always heard with the same level of attention. As indicated by Professor Miloje M. Vasić in his famous book Žiča and Lazarica: Studies in Mediaeval Serbian Art,4 seen as a virtue, in the Greek Eastern Orthodox Church, the hesychast ex- perience was subject to fluctuation – subject to rising and declining.5 Vasić argues that the fluctuations in the persistence of Hesychasm – as the ideal of monastic life – are related to a particular phenomenon in Byzantine art: the phenomenon of adhering to, and at a later stage even copying of the old models from the earliest Christian period, that is, the period known as that of the “old fathers.”6 In the introduction to his respective studies of Hesychasm in architecture, sculpture, and painting in Serbian art of the 13th and 14th centuries, Vasić states that the return to the oldest of artifacts, models, and types, a phenomenon also known as archaism, is encountered in the history of Byzantine art, there, where after a spiritual or political crises, Hesychasm makes a return and becomes again embraced by the Church.7
In our view, the clearest example which supports Vasić’s conviction is the revival of the Hellenistic aesthetics which occurred in the painting of the Palaiologan period. After the death of Mihail VIII Palaiologos, who during his rule propagated the union with the Roman Catholic Church, his son, Andronikos II Palaiologos, restored Orthodoxy in all its social and cultural domains – contributing therein greatly to a spiritual revival today known as the Palaiologan Renaissance. Thus, during the Palaiologan period, in the do- main of painting, the Hellenistic influences constituted primarily a spiritual kind of re- turn to the past – and were as such paralleled by the new rise of Hesychasm. In this, the orientation towards the Hellenistic heritage was not seen by the Byzantine artists and patrons as a mere borrowing of forms. Rather, the vision of the past was exercised as the only proper insight – or in a manner of speaking as a prophetic kind of incision – into the sphere of the future. Seeing the past through the eyes of the present and seeing the present through the eyes of the future is related to the eschatological thought in Ortho-
3 Kallistos Ware, ‘Act out of Stillness’: The Influence of Fourteenth-Century Hesychasm on Byzantine and Slav Civili- zation (Toronto: The Hellenic Canadian Association of Constantinople and the Thessalonikean Society of Metro Toron- to, 1995), 20.
4 Miloje M. Vasić, Žiča i Lazarica: Studije iz Srpske Umetnosti Srednjega Veka (Beograd: Izdavačka Knjižara Gece Kona, Knez Mihailova Ulica 1, 1928). In cyrillic: Милоје М. Васић, Жича и Лазарица: Студије из Српске Уметности Сре- дњега Века (Београд: Издавачка Књижара Геце Кона, Кнез Михаилова Улица 1, 1928).
5 Ibid., 204. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 205.
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