Page 14 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
This book takes a large theme—the affinity that has been perceived between the aspi- rations of modernist art and the canons of the Orthodox icon, as recovered a century ago—and seeks to explore it by looking at Byzantine art from the eleventh century to El Greco (controversially perceived as belonging to that tradition), on the way drawing in fourteenth-century hesychast theory which, in exploring the metaphysical presupposi- tions of the prayer of the heart, deepened the practice of Byzantine iconography (mean- ing by practice both the artistic intentions of the iconographers and the apophatic inten- tionality of those who engaged in hesychast prayer), as well as exploring the pull to- wards abstraction present in the frescoes of Mistra, and the way in which the depiction of Christ’s birth in the cave recalls the abstraction of pre-historic cave paintings—as well as bringing the presuppositions of Byzantine iconography to bear on understanding the modernism of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Rothko—all this demonstrated with an intellec- tual rigour, not blunted by the range of Todorović’s imagination, and with his imagina- tive flights supported, rather than reined in, by the integrity of his intellect.
Archpriest Andrew Louth, Professor Emeritus, University of Durham UK
12