Page 21 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Introduction
against aristocratic social and political norms of the age of Enlightenment. Thriving on the power of vision and imagination, the painting of Romanticism simultaneously praised intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism. It focused on Nature as a place free from the restrictions imposed by society and social norms. This attitude is most ob- vious in the almost completely abstract (late) compositions of English Romantic land- scape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). It is noteworthy that the Ro- mantics, on the one hand, rediscovered the beauty of Gothic monuments, while on the other they showed no particular interest in the works of art from the Early Christian and Byzantine world, probably because of the religious themes in them.
In the 19th century German aesthete Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887) found the images of Byzantine saints to resemble mummies.3 In essence, anything at all different in form from the Classical prototypes was not appreciated by Neo-Classicists. However, towards the end of the 19th century, a more positive perception of Byzantine art already began to be nurtured among art historians, mainly of Russian descent. The 20th century brought with it the rise of photographic and cinematographic technologies – new and innovative art disciplines in their own right – which originated in the 19th century. The rise of photography and cinematography had suffocated any objective need for realism in the practices of fine art. Consequently, this led to a need for an art that is oriented towards a different direction, in any case not towards the realistic or the romantic. More particularly, at around 1900 there emerged a tendency in Western art towards two-di- mensionality, stylisation and towards the exploration of archetypal patterns underlying all forms of visual expression.
This new orientation in art, which consequently gave birth to the abstract art of Mod- ernism, was contemporaneous with the growing interest of certain scholars in not only Early Christian and Byzantine art, but also Primitive and Archaic art. In the early 20th century, the work of Gabriel Millet (1867–1953) stands out as an immense contribution to the later achievements in the field of the history of Byzantine art. Although it was 18th century French encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713–1784), who emerged as the first ‘mod- ern’ authority to treat Byzantine art seriously, it was in fact Millet who, as late as 1916, was the first to seriously refute the unfavourable views of his predecessors, therein mak- ing an objective evaluation of the art of the Late Byzantine period possible.4 After Millet,
3 See: Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (6 volumes, 1846–1857). Volume 4: Kunstleh- re. Bildnerkunst/Malerei (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1923), 424.
4 Regarding Diderot’s views on Byzantine art see also the text by Professor Demetrius Constantelos entitled The Byzantine Empire, which is a synopsis of the Alexander S. Onassis Lecture Series (March 2002). URL: http://intraweb. stockton.edu/eyos/arhu/content/docs/djc%20archive/The%20Byzantine%20Empire%20What%20was%20it....pdf
19