ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Byzantine art in the era of Sylvester Syropoulos’s Memoirs.2 It does so through the lens of Syropoulos’s most notorious passage on art: the oft-quoted reflection on images cited above, which he attributes to the imperial confessor and future Orthodox patriarch, Gregory Melissenos.3 In the council’s arduous deliberations on union, the holy icons were not a notable issue. In the history of art, on the other hand, the council coincided with a particularly formative moment in the artistic traditions of both Byzantium and the West. This is signalled by the fact that in the year 1436, as the delegates were preparing for the council,
1 Vitalien Laurent (ed.), Les ‘Mémoires’ du Grand Ecclésiarque de l’Église de Constantinople. Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438-1439) (Paris, 1971), IV. 46, 250, lines 24-28: ‘Ἐγὼ ὅτε εἰς ναὸν εἰσέλθω Λατίνων, οὐ προσκυνῶ τινα ἐκεῖσε ἁγίων, ἐπεὶ οὐδὲ γνωρίζω τινά. Τὸν Χριστὸν ἴσως μόνον γνωρίζω, ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ἐκεῖνον προσκυνῶ · διότι οὐκ οἶδα πῶς ἐπιγράφεται, ἀλλὰ ποιῶ τὸν σταυρόν μου καὶ προσκυνῶ. Τὸν σταυρὸν οὖν, ὃν αὐτὸς ποιῶ, προσκυνῶ καὶ οὐχ ἕτερόν τι τῶν ἐκεῖσε θεωρουμένων μοι.’
