Page 74 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
Constantinople – images 48–49.102 However, the innovation in The Second Coming at the refectory at Great Lavra is particularly revealing and Zacharias Papantoniou is right in saying that this scene constitutes a significant step towards the freedom of expression, and that it reveals that the painters of the Orthodox world would have been more daring in their work if they had the opportunity to paint on unrestricted wall surfaces.103 This brings us back to the enigma of El Greco.
We know that having moved to Venice and thereafter, El Greco gradually lost a sense of restriction – not just to the rules of the Byzantine tradition, but also, he lost a sense of restriction to any rules other than those which his own style was producing. We are of the view that this in itself indirectly reflects a specific kind of creative potentiality, one which within the Byzantine and Post Byzantine periods is not exclusively limited to the person of El Greco. More particularly, perhaps the way Theophanes the Cretan rendered The Second Coming in the refectory of the Great Lavra entails a typically Greek mode of conceiving a composition. And perhaps the potentiality of such a mode was waiting to blossom in the work of a person (such as El Greco) who needed to be taken out of the traditional Byzantine environment and become re-planted elsewhere, so as to live the existent spiritual vision without the defined limitations imposed by tradition – limita- tions which regard the technique and style of Byzantine painting. Of course, in saying this we by no means wish to undermine the Western influences which had a decisive role in the formation of El Greco’s personal style; these Western influences are the in- separable part of El Greco’s experience of being re-planted in a different environment.
If we accept the above presented hypothesis, then in view of Theophanes’ considera- bly free and almost El Greco-like rendering of The Second Coming at the refectory of the Great Lavra, we could argue that Theophanes the Cretan is an El Greco that stayed home.104 In this particular sense, and without aspiring to oversimplify the related phe- nomena, we could say that the other Theophanes who in the 14th century went to Russia
102 As stated by Tsigaridas: “Introduced into church programmes of decoration in the ninth to tenth century, the Last Judgment took shape mainly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and was further developed and expanded in the fifteenth and, especially, sixteenth centuries. The iconography comes from the Revelation of St John, Old Testament prophecies, the Apocalypse of Paul, and the eschatological teachings of Christ (Matt. 25:31–46).” See: Ευθύμιος Ν. Τσι- γαρίδας και Δημήτρης Ζ. Σοφιανός, Άγια Μετέωρα, Ιερά Μονή Αγίου Νικολάου Αναπαυσά Μετεώρων: Ιστορία-Τέχνη (Τρίκαλα: Ιερά Μονή Αγίου Νικολάου Αναπαυσά, 2003), 111.
103 Ζαχαρίας Παπαντωνίου, Η Ζωγραφική στο Άγιον Όρος. Ανάτυπο από: Άγιον Όρος: Άθως, Ιστορία, Τέχνη, Παρά- δοση. Πρόλογος-Επιμέλεια: I.M. Χατζηφώτης (Εκδόσεις Παπαδήμα, 1996), 50.
104 After the death of Theophanes the Cretan in 1559, for more than two centuries, in the Orthodox world, the style of his painting was regarded in a certain sense as the official style of ecclesial painting. Thereafter, his style was pursued by monk painters until the 19th century.
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