Page 180 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
Byzantine painting (13th to mid 15th century) became comparatively constrained in Post Byzantine painting (mid 15th to late 17th century) due to the Ottoman conquest, whilst remaining misunderstood in the West until the beginning of the 20th century.
What this chapter will primarily address is the deeper aesthetic significance and the diachronic character of the frescoes at Mistra. Given that in the early 20th century a great scholarly interest in Byzantine heritage emerged, until now frescoes of Mistra have been discussed many times in various publications.2 However, concerning the more recent pe- riod, while the existent publications which relate to the art of Mistra include to a limited extent aesthetic considerations of frescoes,3 they do not elaborate adequately on their deeper artistic significance and their diachronic character. Further, there are no publica- tions that interpret the aesthetics of the frescoes at Mistra in terms of their relationship specifically to the artistic achievement of great abstract painters of the 20th century: Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko. Our view is that besides the con- text of the ecclesial tradition, the diachronic character of the frescoes at Mistra can be observed in view of the fact that the aforementioned great Modern painters of the 20th century creatively adopted in their abstract work certain aspects of the aesthetics of Late Byzantine painting, including those that particularly characterise the frescoes at Mistra.
Over the years, the studious in situ examination of the frescoes at Mistra has allowed us to consider these simultaneously within as well as beyond their archaeological con- text. By virtue of such a consideration, while observing a fragment of a fresco that pre- serves the grace and freshness of the Byzantine painter’s brush, a contemporary viewer is essentially reading a historical and aesthetic text, which directly testifies to a dia- chronic kind of enlightenment and a yet to be appreciated medieval modernism which occurred much before the Modernism of the 20th century.
Within a different historical context and due to different circumstances, some of the 20th century abstract painters have aesthetically formulated their vision of human pres- ence in a manner which significantly relates to the experience of painters who worked at Mistra and elsewhere in the Byzantine Empire. Even if we were to ignore that a num- ber of Modernist painters were very much interested in Byzantine aesthetics, the aes-
2 The most notable of these are the following: Robert Byron & David Talbot-Rice, The Birth of Western Painting. A History of Colour, Form, and Iconography (Routledge Revivals / Routledge, 2013). This book was originally published in 1930 under a title The Birth of Western Painting. A History of Colour, Form and Iconography Illustrated from the Paintings of Mistra and Mount Athos, of Giotto and Duccio and of El Greco. Steven Runciman, Μυστράς (Καρδαμίτσα, 2003).
3 Μανόλης Χατζηδάκης, Μυστράς: Η Μεσαιωνική Πολιτεία και το Κάστρο (Αθήνα: Εκδοτική Αθηνών, 2005). Μυρ- τάλη Αχειμάστου-Ποταμιάνου, Μυστράς: Ιστορικός και Αρχαιολογικός Οδηγός (Αθήνα: Έσπερος / Κλειώ, 2003). Μαίρη Άσπρα-Βαρδαβάκη, Μελίτα Εμμανουήλ, Η Μονή της Παντάνασσας στον Μυστρά: Οι τοιχογραφίες του 15ου αιώνα (Αθήνα: Εμπορική Τράπεζα της Ελλάδος, 2005).
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