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Are 'Devout Imagination' and 'Seeing Through Images' Coloured by National Identity

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Are 'Devout Imagination' and 'Seeing Through Images' Coloured by National Identity Are ‘devout imagination’ and ‘seeing through images’ coloured by national identity? The Romanian case1 Elena ENE D-VASILESCU Keywords: Church iconography; icon and fresco painting; Byzantine sphere of influence; Romanian Church; Saint Parascheva of the Balkans; St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai One way in which ‘devout imagination’ can manifest itself – especially in an Orthodox Christian context as that which Romania presents from a religious perspective – is through people’s attitude towards saints, or rather to a particular aspect of the process of canonization: how people choose some among them to be elevated among the ranks of the sacred. We shall touch to a certain extent on this issue at the end of the paper, after explaining some details of how ‘seeing through images’ concerns holy persons2. Now we shall focus on Church iconography (wood panel icons and wall-paintings) because this not only gives a concrete form to devotion, but offers a more direct answer to the question in the title of this paper. The Byzantine elements in Romanian ecclesiastical art Among the countries involved in the game of influence and communication regarding icon and fresco painting is Romania, which has inherited a church art of Byzantine lineage. This country entered the “Byzantine Commonwealth” in the fourteenth century (Obolensky 1971), when in the empire ruled the Palaeologue dynasty. What is the role that Byzantium played in the formation of Romanian church art in terms of teaching and guidance? In what way did communication worked after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 in the area previously under the Byzantine sphere of influence, including Romania? Our responses to these preliminary inquiries will facilitate answering the question in our title here. The religious art of the fourteenth century was characterized by a more expressive tendency than what monumentality favoured by Macedonean family displayed. The rise of the Romanian medieval states, and the canonical organization of the Orthodox Church in each of them led to the development of a specific Romanian style of icon and mural painting with distinctive characteristics that ‘grew’ on an initial Byzantine base. This peculiar style was a combination of 1This text was presented at Ertegun House, University of Oxford, on the 11th of May 2013 on the occasion of an event entitled ‘Romanian in Oxford: language, culture and history’. University of Oxford, Great Britain. 2 There are many books on icons and among them we can mention those by Robin Cormack, Maria Vassilaki, Elena Ene D-Vasilescu, Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, Mary Cunningham, and Angeliki Lymberopoulou. 431 Elena ENE D-VASILESCU canonical Byzantine guidance and many innovations. Later, elements from folk and Western art were accepted in the liturgical art of the country. But what were the characteristics of religious decoration in Byzantium itself? There has been a long discussion in literature about many of its aspects, primarily in regard to what was to be included in the definition of ‘Byzantine art’. That was so because, in spite of the fact that the productions of the imperial capital, Constantinople, were usually considered as the standard, the contributions from dependent provinces of the empire – Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, and Egypt – demanded an equal place within this definition. Those from the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ (Russia and the Balkans) (Obolensky 1971), had also their claims from this point of view. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the artists used to travel or live as refugees as a consequence of frequent internal and external conflicts (see for example Stephanos of Aila, “architect and craftsman”, who went from Constantinople to Egypt, where he built the Monastery of St. Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai [Weitzmann 1975: 82] and later, in the fourteenth century, Theophanes [c. 1340 – c. 1410] the Greek – actually he was from Crete since ‘the Cretan’ appellation is also used in his case – migrated to Russia: in 1370 he moved to Novgorod, and in 1395 to Moscow). Therefore, the question concerning whether ‘devout imagination’ and ‘seeing through images’ are nationally tinted is not at all new. Otto Demus points out some aspects of Byzantine art which he considered distinctive in comparison to Hellenistic art from which it evolved. His characterisation summarizes the main opinions on this issue and we shall operate with it here: In Byzantine art, forms have become divisible and this divisibility is perhaps one of the most characteristic and, from the Western medieval point of view, one of their most useful attributes. This feature emerged firstly in technique and modeling, when the continuous gradation or the illusionistic color patch technique of Hellenistic painting was supplanted by a three- or four-tone system in which a medium tone is modified by one or two darker and one or two lighter shades, all quite distinct and not merging into each other; a similar principle dominated the representation of the human figure, which was divided into its component parts, parcelled out, as it were, and put together like model figures, with the joints clearly articulated and the movements somewhat mechanized and overstressed. The same spirit of division and articulation ruled Byzantine composition: the arrangement is simple, legible, paratactic and quasi-geometrical; compositions can easily be taken to pieces, and every one of their parts may be substituted by another. This enabled artists to express a new content by applying minor adjustments to ready-made, traditional forms (Demus 1970: 12–13). His words seem to be illustrated by some icons, as for instance that in Fig. 1 432 Are ‘devout imagination’ and ‘seeing through images’ coloured by national identity?... Fig. 1 St. Archangel Michael, Curtea de Argeş Monastery, 1526, fresco by Dobromir of Târgovişte, 256x126 cm. Now in the Museum of Romanian Art, Bucharest, Drăguţ, Romanian Art: Prehistory, Antiquity…, vol. 1, illustration p. 386, caption p. 3873. But actually, I do not think that the first part of the above description (about divisibility and interchangeability) has ever been an attribute of the Romanian style of icon and wall-painting, if it ever was with respect to Byzantine art at all. In support of my idea it is worth mentioning that some of the renowned iconographers deliberately broke the canons, and this was socially accepted; the climax of this process was reached in the second half of the nineteenth century with Nicolae Grigorescu and Gheorghe Tăttărescu [both were icon-painters in their youth], but earlier similar or even more radical such phenomena took place somewhere else (as, for example, in the former Serbian kingdom – we can see an instance from 1422). Fig. 2 a. Sfântul Gheorghe [St George], a fragment // from the interior fresco by Nicolae Grigorescu, Agapia Monastery; Diaconescu, Biserici şi mânăstiri ortodoxe, illustrations and caption p. 146. 3 Vasile Drăguţ, Romanian Art: Prehistory, Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Bucharest, Meridiane Publishing House, 1984, vol. 1. 433 Elena ENE D-VASILESCU Fig. 2 b. The icon of Mother of God Pelagonitissa, painted by Makarios, 1422, 135x95 cm (52 ¾ x 36 ¾ in.) Art Gallery, Cvetan Grozdanov, Icons and frescoes from the treasures of Macedonia, the Secretariat for Information of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, Skopje, 1976, Plate 6. On the other hand, Demus pertinently remarks that, [the] absolute distinctness of meaning is another of the attributes which enabled Byzantine art to become the magistra Europae. Every representation, from the simplest to the most complicated, compound image, had its specific message that remained unchanged through centuries; and every image had a solemn grandeur which made it a fit representation of the Holy (Ibid: 15). Since the holy images are an important part of the Liturgy in the Eastern Churches, and the Liturgy has come unchanged throughout the centuries, it is natural for the images used during the Liturgy to have preserved the same meaning and to convey the same message across all time; Fig. 3 a, b, c refer to both old and new representations. Fig. 3 a. The Virgin between St. Theodore and St George, Encaustic, sixth century, 68.5x49.7 cm, Sinai; Manafis (ed.), The Treasures of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, Athens, Ekdotike Athenon, 1990, p. 138– 139 (Fig. 4). 434 Are ‘devout imagination’ and ‘seeing through images’ coloured by national identity?... Fig. 3 b. Virgin Hodegetria and Child, Monastery of Bistriţa, Vâlcea County; tempera on wood, 124x107 cm; 1513. Now in the Museum of Romanian Art, Bucharest; Drăguţ, Romanian Art: Prehistory, Antiquity…, vol. 1, illustration p. 381, caption p. 380. Fig. 3 c. Icon of the Mother of God with the Child, tempera on wood with a golden background, by Maria- Magdalena Şerban; my own collection and photograph, autumn 2002. Eunice Deuterman Maguire and Henry Maguire underline the fact that in Byzantium, “The very legitimacy of the holy image depended upon its adherence to tradition and its supposed accuracy in reproducing the prototype” (Deuterman Maguire, Maguire 2007: 158). Along the same lines, Oleg Ju. Tarasov shows: “In the Byzantine tradition the requirement to adhere strictly to the ancient models that were ‘revealed’ to the saints lay at the foundation of all religious art” (Tarasov 2002: 171). And, indeed, the “Byzantine canons” are still kept today in some countries (certainly in Romania where, during my visits in churches undergoing painting, I found the iconographers with a reprint of an eighteenth century Hermeneia [Grammar book] written by Dionysius of Fourna (Săndulescu-Verna ed. 2000: 3) in front of them. This Manual is partially based on traditional material written as early as the tenth century (Idem). Leonid Ouspensky underlined the fact that “Byzantine norms” are still followed by modern iconographers and, as just mentioned above, what he said in the beginning of the twentieth century (Ouspensky vol. III: 1992; Lossky, Ouspensky 1999) still holds true.
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