Page 318 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
ment from a conclusion of the relevant study written by Robert Luyster, entitled Nietzsche/ Dionysus: Ecstasy, Heroism, and the Monstrous:
“Throughout Nietzsche’s philosophy, under the same rubric, two – and finally three – distinctively different conceptions of the Dionysian alternate. The first, Dionysus as representative of immediate and sensuous embrace of and joy in the flux of phenomena, which we termed the ecstatic Dionysian, is properly Dionysian in the Greek-historical sense, and may in that sense with the most justice be called Dionysian. The second, Di- onysus as the individual ego with the strength to impose its own form upon that flux, which we described as the heroic Dionysian, is properly not Dionysian at all (at least, according to the classical, and Nietzsche’s earliest understanding of Dionysus), but, on Nietzsche’s own terms in BT, Apollonian. The third and last, Dionysus as savage scourge of nature, whose chief pleasure consists in the pitiless slaughter of countless ‘failures,’ while identified under the same name is very much the antipode of his original version of Dionysus. The conflict or connection between the three and, it appears, the appeal of each to Nietzsche personally, he was never in any significant way able to settle or re- solve, although in his last years of sanity delight in the brutalisation of the masses – the monstrous epiphany of Dionysus – became a hypnotically attractive image.”26
In view of Luyster’s analysis, one may begin to tangibly conceive how Rothko’s im- mensely creative mind experienced and even thrived on the fluctuating conceptions of the Dionysian, which were discussed by Nietzsche in his writings. Beyond the problem of Nietzsche’s fluctuations, there is the factor of Nietzsche’s extremely engaging style of writing displayed in The Birth of Tragedy, or rather, there is the convincing plasticity with which he has presented his views; views which in part coincidently concern the plasticity present in visual art (by virtue of reference to Apollonian, sculptural art). This convincingness of his argument, and again, its plasticity, is born from Nietzsche’s per- sonal, dramatic vision of human tragedy.
Most importantly, in our view, it is because his vision of human tragedy is literal, and not symbolic or simply theoretical, that the plasticity of Nietzsche’s argument in The Birth of Tragedy was in itself very attractive for Rothko, as it corresponded to Rothko’s own, personal vision of the tragedy of life.
Rothko was probably inspired by the compelling ways in which Nietzsche’s claims are formulated; he was inspired by their overall believability, and their overall aesthetics. It seems that this reality of the tragic was introspectively experienced by Rothko as an in-
26 Robert Luyster, “Nietzsche / Dionysus: Ecstasy, Heroism, and the Monstrous,” initially accessed in 2011, last ac- cessed 9 June 2021, from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20717751?seq=1
316