Page 327 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter VI
Gage to be influenced by Doerner’s aforementioned book.56 It is of particular interest that Doerner discusses the concept of the “inner light” by examining Titian’s technique, where he also associates Titian’s gradual buildup of many glazes with Rembrandt.57
As we have mentioned earlier in this chapter, Rothko claimed that in his own work, the objective of creating scarcely definable tones in depth, which were achieved by the layering of several paints, was the creation of “inner light.”58 Whether Rothko, who felt particularly close to Rembrandt, as well as to Turner, was also familiar with the concept of inner light in Byzantine or Russian-Byzantine painting, is a question of immense sig- nificance for the concerns of our topic in this chapter. Accordingly, later in this chapter we shall refer to the selected visual material and assess the similarities and analogies between the concept of inner light in Rothko’s works of the classic period and its equiv- alent in Late Byzantine painting.
As has been observed, white was used abundantly even in the darker paintings of Rothko’s final years.59 In the early phase of his artistic development, watercolour was Rothko’s preferred medium, and Gage observes that Rothko’s method of creating inner light owes partly to his practice in watercolour.60 As a basic point of comparison, a note- worthy characteristic of Byzantine fresco painting is that it is a watercolour-like tech- nique, applied on fresh mortar, where the effect of the inner light is achieved through gradually adding white to the colour-mixture of each of the distinct (and slightly trans- parent) succeeding layers. Also, the surface of the fresh mortar absorbs the colours in such a manner that they become notably paler, which also contributes to the ethereal effect of the inner light, often observed in Byzantine frescoes. Rothko’s grinding of his own pigments and the use of a variety of egg tempera are also aspects common to Byz- antine painting – as well as the fact that he liked to prepare his canvases with rabbit-skin glue (as rabbit-skin glue is also used in Byzantine portable icons).61
Further, the following observation by Gage unassumingly indicates a possibility of a Byzantine influence in terms of Rothko’s idiosyncratic usage of white: “Rothko’s prac- tice of mixing white into his hues is noticeable from the 1930s onward, quite apart from white paintings such as No. 7 (No.11) of 1949 (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid, 249–250.
58 Ibid, 249.
59 See: John Gage, “Rothko: Color as Subject,” in Mark Rothko, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (Washington: National Gallery of
Art, in association with New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 250. 60 Ibid.
61 Rabbit-skin glue is a material which is used in preparation of Byzantine portable icons – but in other tradi- tions also.
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