Page 26 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
tion in the narthex of Vatopaidi. The Byzantine painters arrived at such a cinematograph- ic character of the composition, as well as at a number of other aesthetic characteristics, not by making sudden and radical innovations, but through a gradual and centuries-long process of subtly enriching the conventions of the existing tradition.
In fact, we should note that although the painting style before the period of Icono- clasm was coherent, it is only in the periods following Iconoclasm, from 843 and there- after, that Byzantine painting acquired its stylistic and aesthetic completeness – which subsequently led to the emergence of the style which is today often termed as ‘Palaiolo- gan Renaissance.’16 Although we shall mainly be discussing those examples of Byzantine painting which have been completed between the 11th and 16th century, special attention shall be given to Palaiologan painting, which regards the period between the liberation of Constantinople from the Crusaders (1261) and the final fall of the Byzantine Empire (1453). Therefore, our primarily aesthetic approach in the present book does not aspire to provide a comprehensive history of Late Byzantine painting but aims at elaborating on its hitherto undermined diachronic significance.
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In Byzantine artistic tradition, and especially from the Post-Iconoclast period and thereof, the classical sculpturality of form is not a phenomenon of secondary or purely formal significance but constitutes an experience within which the Ancient Greek agal- ma (statue) retains most of its spatial qualities in spite of the fact that from a statue it becomes an icon. In other words, although it limits the observer to a single view-point of itself, the human figure in Byzantine painting retains its classical-sculptural qualities and thereby also its rich Hellenistic heritage. With the pivotal period being that of Post-Iconoclasm, throughout the preceding and subsequent centuries, we observe that in its contemplated transition from a three-dimensional agalma to a two-dimensional icon, it is as if the human body enters a new kind of space, a ‘fourth dimension,’ and therein becomes less bodily, while acquiring a transfigured kind of spatiality, by virtue of which, until the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and well after, the Byzantine body remained closely associated to a sculptural experience.
This less bodily but still of the body artistic experience can find its theoretical roots in the most significant theological writings of the Church Fathers, such as those by St John
16 The term “Palaiologan Renaissance” is regarded as problematic by a number of Byzantine scholars. We shall discuss the perceptions of these scholars in our chapter entitled The Relationship between Hesychasm and the Aesthetics of Late Byzantine Painting.
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