Page 52 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
intense shading in El Greco’s painting), and in the abstracted, fluid rhythm within which the human forms interrelate. However, by having abandoned the line as a means of con- veying the contours, in his later work El Greco constructed the form of his figures by immersing them gradually in light. Admittedly, unlike in Byzantine fresco painting, the light in El Greco’s work is depicted as cast from an angle, but the distribution and inten- sity of that light is far from naturalistic, in a sense that it is present throughout the entire composition. These similarities would perhaps be of lesser significance if the theological understanding of light was not one of the main characteristics of Byzantine, and espe- cially of the Late Byzantine painting. Accordingly, in Panselinos’ work, the details of certain compositions project a very particular notion of a revealing, apocalyptic light.
For example, in the composition of the Crucifixion at Protaton (image 38), Christ is presented with his head deeply tilted towards his right side. In this way the contours of Christ’s head harmonically correspond with the lower contours of the chest – as if the head has dived into an enclosed area which belongs to another dimension. The horizon- tal line of the stretched arms is not discontinued by the tilted head, as only the hair is above this line. In other words, the upper line of the stretched arms continues flawlessly into the bent-neck area and the top of the forehead, passing therein from one arm to the other and leaving the head buried in the illuminated area of the chest. It is not unlikely that this detail is related to the influence of Hesychasm, as Saint John of Sinai (St John Climacus) writes that: “Hesychasm is the enclosing of the bodiless mind (nous) in the bodily house of the body.”36
In short, that which is obvious in Crucifixion at Protaton, is that Panselinos, by adher- ing simultaneously to both a notably abstracted and a notably realistic manner, con- sciously exploits the motif of the tilted head of Christ and therein projects a distinctly theological meaning through the depicted bodily gesture – something that in his later work El Greco does almost as a rule. This probable connection between Panselinos and El Greco relates to the psychology of style and not its outer appearance. As such, this connection leads us to an observation of one complex phenomenon. In particular, in Panselinos’ painting, the tendency towards abstraction (which is otherwise common to Byzantine painting) is most directly related to the concealed levels of theological mean- ing resident in his compositions. This has so far been completely disregarded in the rel- evant literature, as scholars have generally avoided seeing in the person of Panselinos a
36 See: The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 27, 5 (Step 27, 6 in the Holy Transfiguration edition). For the revised edition see: Saint John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (3rd Edition, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2012). More will be said on the influence of Hesychasm in a separate chapter, entitled: The Relationship between Hesychasm and the Aesthet- ics of Late Byzantine Painting.
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