Page 19 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Introduction
gins, indeed, with seeing.2 In addition, following a creative engagement with the historical development of Greek art, we argue that one of the major aims of the practice of art history is to eventually arrive at a particular kind of seeing. Thus, the practice of art his- tory begins with seeing so that one can arrive at a new kind of seeing. This new kind of seeing can conditionally be termed as meta-historical seeing. We name it meta-historical because it attempts to simultaneously understand the examined ancient artifacts from a contemporary point of view and through the eyes of their makers, as well as through the eyes of their epoch in general.
Accordingly, in order to begin seeing beyond the surface of the objective specificities from the past, one must firstly try to produce a new language, through which the rele- vant phenomena can then be articulated to others. For the practice of art history this construction of a new language constitutes a point of the renewal of methodology, and it is at this point that an art historian can offer to the audience what we have termed: the hermeneutics of vision. In light of this last view and given that in Art History, Modernism is the last unquestionably major event of continuing relevance, our hope is that the pre- sented hermeneutics of vision shall also be understood as an artistic intervention in the understanding, contextualisation and interpretation of the art of past periods, especially those periods where similar or parallel phenomena of crisis and transformation were taking place.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to entirely comprehend the powerful impact that the de- piction of a saint or an icon had on the average person in Byzantium. Whether a fresco, mosaic or an icon, it was carried in one’s memory long after the veneration, it was con- templated and re-visualised in one’s mind. Artists would make sketches of those exam- ples of painting that they drew inspiration from or wanted to copy. Such sketches would then travel to distant places where they would be used upon the making of new work, and this new work would then often inspire new sketches. For a Byzantine artist, in spite of the aid provided by such sketches as well as manuscripts, the role of memory was crucial, because the icon is first and foremost a theological experience or a theological truth and not ‘art’ – the way we understand the term in our time. Unlike the abundance of easily forgettable digital imagery that one encounters on daily basis in our contempo- rary epoch, in Byzantine times, through its observation and contemplation, the depic- tion of a saint or a sacred event was permanently planted into one’s memory as a seed of faith. The image perceived with eyes was ultimately carried in the mind and heart and from there it provided spiritual strength to the observer.
2 Henry Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies: Saints and their Images in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), xvii.
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