Page 20 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
The Byznatine fresco-painters worked on fresh mortar, a technique known as ἐφ’ ὑγροῖς (on wet), so that the image might be most permanently set within the church in- terior and thus within the memory of the faithful. After the fall of Byzantium, having understood the power of the Byzantine image, the Ottomans aspired to eradicate it from the consciousness of the believers. In many churches the original decoration is com- pletely destroyed and there is no evidence of how the frescoes might have appeared. Thus, a researcher is limited to an examination only of the preserved examples, and for- tunately, a significant number of those are of the highest quality and as such are able to indicate the true glory of Byzantine painting.
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Before we introduce the reader to the actual content of this work, in the following paragraphs we shall synoptically outline certain perceptions of Byzantine art, as well as general developments in art, which occurred in Western Europe in the period following The Age of Absolutism (c.1610–c.1789) until our own epoch. A keen interest in the lega- cies of the Byzantine Empire arose in France during the 17th century. However this inter- est was mostly restricted to Byzantine historiographical achievements and the political theories concerning the centrality of the imperial office. In the 18th century, the move- ment known as the Enlightenment condemned and rejected Byzantine civilisation in its entirety. To François-Marie Arouet, better known by the pen name Voltaire (1694–1778), and to other representatives of the Enlightenment, Byzantine civilisation constituted a long decline of classical antiquity; it was understood as a negation of the Roman Empire and the name itself became a synonym for decadence. The culmination of this perception is realised in the discourse of scholars such as Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), who in his work entitled The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in VI volumes between 1776 and 1788) described Byzantine civilisation as a long story of dec- adence, decline and corruption which encompassed not only political life but also artis- tic expression, literary articulation and all aspects of creative activities. In their assess- ment of Byzantine aesthetics, scholars like Gibbon sought primarily for resemblances to classical models inaugurating thus the movement which was to be called Neo-Classi- cism. Because of this, the austere stylisation and hieratic immobility that characterises many examples of Byzantine art were considered as barbarous corruptions of proper and ‘canonical’ figurative form.
In the second half of the 18th century, the artistic, literary and intellectual movement of Romanticism gained strength in reaction to the scientific rationalisation of nature which was inspired by the Industrial Revolution; it also constituted in part a revolt
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