Page 182 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
tive perspective, were not used by the Byzantines themselves and they are useful only as our own reference to a particular aesthetic phenomenon.
That said, the inverse perspective in the painting compositions of the Late Byzantine period opens a visual and notional space which is notably different from the one we ob- serve around us in nature. However, this space opened by the inverse perspective is not entirely contradictory to the space observed in nature. The three dimensional space in nature is endless with countless points of reference upon which it simultaneously both commences and ends. In nature, every point of reference is relative and relationship-based in a sense that it can be conceived of only in relation to the collective system of referenc- es to which other similar points belong.
In Byzantine compositions, especially of the late period, there is a different kind of relativity, wherein the first point of reference is the viewer himself/herself, towards whom the lines of the so called inverse perspective close in (as demonstrated in image 2). More precisely, the viewer is considered and understood as a point from which the vision is projected towards infinity and it is because of this concept that when the view- er is in front of a composition of Late Byzantine painting the lines of the inverse perspec- tive essentially begin to implicitly open up and expand from the viewer’s eye lens to- wards the infinity of the background depth of the painted composition (image 2). The second and equally important point of reference which is aesthetically implied in the Byzantine composition is the space of transcendental infinity, which is implied in the overall background of the composition by virtue of the fact that its perspective expands in the distance rather than closes in towards the distance.
In this way, as seen in image 3 each depicted theme is essentially ‘placed’ between the infinity which continuously expands in the background of the composition and the smallest point of reference being the eye of the observer. Therefore, the viewer is ab- sorbed by the depicted theme into a tangibly different dimension which alludes to a different and more substantial reality than the one we are accustomed to call ‘nature.’ In this higher reality of the Byzantine painting experience one can observe a light which, theologically speaking, precedes the created world and therefore dynamically exists within all its elements.
But before we consider further the question of light, it is quite noteworthy that the so called inverse perspective in Byzantine painting reveals an extraordinary relationship to the humanity’s gaze and orientation towards the Universe. To understand this we must firstly imagine two adjacent perfectly straight lines drawn from the surface of our Plan- et at a right angle towards the outer Universe. The drawing shown in image 4 is deliber- ately exaggerated for the sake of clarity. As seen in image 4, because the surface of the
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