Page 13 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Introduction
ernism and the rediscovered icon has been either by artists trying to think one form in terms of the other, or by art historians pursuing influences, or by philosophers of art seeking to understand what structures of thought there might be common to Modernism and seemingly presupposed by the ancient iconographic tradition. If there is a common theme, it might be characterized as a rejection of depiction as trying to create an illusion of reality in favour of seeing art as a way of encountering the real, or engaging with being/Being—which was St Sophrony of Essex’s quest as an artist, prior to becoming a monk.3 It might also be said that finding such a theme and pursuing it, more than fitful- ly, is rare, because it requires the combined skills of an art historian, a philosopher of art, and a practising artist. It is just these skills that Uroš Todorović brings to this book, the fruit of a decade’s reflection and artistic struggle since the publication of his Ph.D. thesis in 2012.
My first memory of Uroš concerns one of his quite striking insights. The original dec- oration of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople is universally described as aniconic (if not anti-iconic). Uroš’s theory concerned the marble panels in the walls of the nave. They are not figurative icons, but Uroš argued that they are not random deco- ration, either. They are formed from prepared slabs of marble, carefully split and then ‘opened out’ (like a book), the surfaces revealed then being levelled and polished so that the shapes formed by the differently coloured strata of the marble panel face each other symmetrically. They echo the figures of the six-winged seraphim in the pendentives be- neath the dome (which are later, and likely, I suppose, inspired by the low walls at the bottom of the pillars), but they are certainly not figurative. Nevertheless, they seem in- stinct with what one can only call meaning; they are not mute. Uroš called them ‘apophat- ic’ icons: icons that speak by denying meaning—gesturing, as it were, towards the tran- scendent. Sometime after reading what Uroš had written about this and talking with him, I visited Hagia Sophia (not for the first time), and saw these marble panels as I had never seen them before: precisely as apophatic, refraining from any kataphatic assertion, inducing the capacity ‘of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (as the English poet, Keats, described what he called ‘neg- ative capability’), or still more precisely as apophatic icons, answering to Florensky’s account of the role of the icon: ‘Like light pouring forth light, the icon stands revealed. And no matter where the icon is physically located in the space we encounter it, we can only describe our experience of seeing it as a beholding that ascends.’4
3 See the works of Sr Gabriela of the Monastery of St John the Baptist in Essex, especially: ‘Being’: The Art and Life of Father Sophrony (Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, Essex: 2016).
4 Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 72. 11