Page 39 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter I
Although El Greco’s mature style of painting does not aim to simply copy the kind of distortions characteristic of Byzantine painting, with a certain degree of creativity in one’s perception, some distortions of human form, which are typical of El Greco’s ma- ture style, can be related to the distortions found in the Byzantine painting of the 11th, 12th and 13th century. We provide here an example (images 15 and 16) where we have placed the hand of Christ the Pantokrator at Daphni next to a hand painted by El Greco – which is a detail of his painting entitled Saint Ildefonso. In view of this comparison the argu- ment is that the Byzantine analogy detected in El Greco’s rendering of the hand is a phenomenon which owes to El Greco’s conscious intention to reinvent his (Byzantine) artistic heritage. The fast and decisive brush work and the elongated fingers of Saint Il- defonso amount to a stylized form clearly comparable to Christ’s hand shown in image 15.
In order to test this hypothesis in El Greco’s other paintings, next to the other hand of the Christ at Daphni (image 17) we placed a hand of El Greco’s Mary Magdalene (image 18) as well as a hand from his work entitled The Knight with a Hand on his Chest (image 19). Here, due to a higher level of realism of the hands painted by El Greco, one could dispute the hypothesis easier than in the previous example – but the similarity neverthe- less remains visible. The depiction of two fingers closely joined together, in hands which are touching the chest (images 18 and 19) is a motif all too reminiscent of the Pantokra- tor’s hand which holds a book close to His chest. We should emphasise that in spite of the fact that in our comparisons we give attention to certain details of form, we do so in order to explain the particular psychology of style which is common to both El Greco and the discussed examples of Byzantine painting, and not in order to simply argue that El Greco struggled to liberate himself from the Byzantine experience or that he arrived at his mature style by simply reinventing that experience. Thus, although any further analyses will continue to address certain formal aspects of the selected examples of El Greco’s painting, the main aim of these is to reveal the existence of a Byzantine El Greco beyond the realm of form.
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Towards this end, selected representative examples of Byzantine painting of the 12th and 13th century could be studied. The Nerezi church, built in 1164, during the Komnenian dynasty, is of small size, and within its interior intriguingly elaborate compositions are found. As observed by David Talbot-Rice, given their metropolitan style and their clear distinction from most other frescoes of that period in the regions of FYROM, Greece,
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