Page 152 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
Byzantine painters has outlived our Modernism, while their Modernism seems to chal- lenge our current state of art. Accordingly, in view of Hesychasm as a spiritual but also artistic experience, the period of Byzantine painting known in relevant literature as Palaiologan Renaissance should be regarded as a spiritual renaissance whose protago- nists continuously received new light form the internal vision of the transfigured Thean- thropos. In this renaissance, the Late Byzantine painters have understood that man is not called to invent or depict the light, but is invited to become transfigured by the eternal light, because, in the words of Socrates: “it appears that within eternity, a man either lives as a man or he has not yet been born.”71
71 Plato, Meno, 86a. Our translation of: «δῆλον γὰρ ὅτι τὸν πάντα χρόνον ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν ἄνθρωπος.» Ours is admittedly a free translation of this sentence by Plato, which is otherwise often translated as follows: “For clearly he has always either been or not been a human being.” That said, by saying that a human being “always either is or is not a human being” (πάντα χρόνον ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν ἄνθρωπος) Socrates places an emphasis on the state of being of the human being within eternity, as opposed to his/her state of being as it commonly appears to us in this transitory, earth- ly life. This is why we deliberately offered a more loose translation (interpretation) which includes the ‘is or is not’ notion of a human being who in eternity either lives as a human being or has not yet been born.
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