Truth and Convention in Byzantine Descriptions of Works of Art

SINCE the Renaissance, commentators have seen abstraction as a major characteristic of Byzantine art. It was on account of its lack of naturalism that Vasari, in the sixteenth century, condemned the Byzantine style. In his view this ‘‘style of lines and profiles” represented a low point in the history of painting; it was only the genius of such artists as Cimabue and Giotto that restored painting on its correct course toward the imitation of nature. ¹ In our own century, on the other hand, the unnaturalistic qualities of Byzantine art have been regarded with favor. The critic Clive Bell, for example, wrote in 1914 that “Post-Impressionism …. shakes hands across the ages with the Byzantine primitives.” ² He even went so far as to say that “Giotto’s art is definitely inferior to the very finest Byzantine of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.” ³ The writing of a pioneer of abstract painting, Kandinsky, testifies that Byzantine art has exerted an influence on the development of modern art. ⁴ But if we have now come to respect Byzantine art because of its abstract tendency, it is puzzling that this aspect of it seems to have been neither valued nor even acknowledged by Byzantine commentators themselves. Byzantine descriptions of their own works of art, at whatever period they were written, usually stress the realism of the art, and reveal no awareness of any lack of naturalism. It has been suggested that the reason for this discrepancy between the post-Renaissance view of Byzantine art and that of Byzantine writers is that they were following a literary tradition which had been formulated in the classical period. ⁵