SKU: Anal_Vol15_2022
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This article has two aims. One is to offer a bird’s-eye view of the Byzantine icon as it evolved from the sixth century to the thirteenth, when the great icon collection at the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai saw its medieval apogee. The other is to assess one thirteenth-century icon that exemplifies that apogee. It is an icon of the great martyr Marina of Antioch in Pisidia smiting Beelzebub and belongs to the group of close to two hundred ‘crusader icons’ that survive almost exclusively on Sinai itself. Just what the ‘crusader icons’ were has been debated since they were first given that name in the 1960s. The article argues that the icon of St Marina, though appearing at first to be Byzantine, was most probably made for a Latin owner, and brings out one of the most fundamental ways in which the purposes assigned to the image by the Greek Church were distinct from those assigned to it by the Roman one.
In the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, the clergy prayed at the Epiklesis that God would send down his Holy Spirit to transform the Eucharistic bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Yet as early as the fifth century, there is evidence that Christians doubted this invisible trans- formation. Byzantine artists drew on biblical narratives of the Spirit’s descent to illustrate the Eucharistic mystery. In the Early Byzantine period, gold and silver doves hung above altars and fonts to represent the Spirit’s descent. In the post-Iconoclastic period, spatial icons near altars served similar functions. This paper presents four such images: the Annunciation, Pentecost, the Hetoimasia, and the Ascension. It argues that these images encouraged worshippers to visualize the Spirit’s descent and the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
Paul Klee’s short book Über moderne Kunst (‘On Modern Art’) was the stimulus for the dialogue attempted in this particular text. It is a dialogue on the part of an artist who has built his reflections on aesthetics on the basis of what is known as Byzantine art, which is a continuation of the Greek artistic tradition. It presents, as counterpoint, the particular mode of thinking of an iconographer on all the central issues and themes which govern artistic practice. It therefore discusses the role of the artist, how nature is perceived, the function of pictorial elements and, of course, the deeper reason determining the composition. It shows the wide gap which exists between an artistic creator belonging to modernism and a painter of the Byzantine/Greek tradition, for whom painting is conceived as a liturgy, as regards the community, and is not primarily a tool for the artist to express his personal visions.
This paper traces the impact of Christ’s words quoted in the title on Christian culture. Although well-known and highly appreciated, this biblical motive, nevertheless, does not seem to be highly influential in actual ecclesiastical life—against the backdrop of its easily recognizable striving towards sublimity and earnestness. Or maybe simply the advancement of theoretical tools has been needed (awaited) in order to detect this kind of influence? The introduction of the notion of play, which only in twentieth century got a proper theoretical framing, is the key methodological innovation that will be proposed in order to answer the questions opened on following pages. With the help of this tool, not only the influence of the ‘become as little children’ strategy in the history of ecclesiastical life becomes evident, but the deep intersec- tion of arts and worship gets wider cultural grounding, while artistic style(s) developed on this line of intersection are further elaborated—in historical and in contemporary ecclesiastical contexts.
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