Home | Beauty as Liturgy Composition in Byzantine Painting; A Dialogue with Paul Klee

Beauty as Liturgy Composition in Byzantine Painting; A Dialogue with Paul Klee

an article in Volume 15 – Orthodox Iconography II by Georgios Kordis

Former Assistant Professor, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; Iconographer, Painter

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.

Prologue

In 1924, Paul Klee wrote a series of notes to sketch out the basic points of a lecture he then gave at the opening of an exhibition in Jena, Germany. These notes later became the book published under the title Über moderne Kunst (‘On Modern Art’) and became one of the most important texts written by an active Modernist artist. Despite the fact that these notes are of a fragmentary and often vague nature, with many points not particularly well developed, they still, to this day, constitute significant and valuable material for any artist, art historian, and those interested in the arts in a general way, who would like to understand how an artist conceives the style and the nature of creation and of a work of art in general.

In this brief essay, Klee summarizes and presents with particular clarity and lucidity the portrait of the artist as it was shaped in the West from the Renaissance onwards, and especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, within the context of Modernism. What Klee writes in this small book recapitulates in a most wonderful way the function of modern artists and indirectly but clearly defines the character of a work of art, its place, and the relationship viewers have with it. In general, we might say that in a simple but clear manner he sketches the outline of artistic creativity.

My involvement with this text goes back many years, to the eighties, when I read it in the Greek translation by Demosthenes Kourtovik. The text charmed me with its many virtues, its depth, and its multi-faceted dimensions. When, later, I studied the world of Byzantine art and attempted to somehow delve deeper into the discourse regarding artistic creation in this world, I understood better the thoughts of Klee, as these were set out in his book. This was not because there was any related information in my reading, nor any direct reference, but because Byzantine art—as a different and comprehensive visual system—gave me a perspective to read Klee’s text from a critical point of view, realizing that, in its few but meaningful pages, it contained a comprehensive discourse concerning the visual experience and its coefficients.

So, many years later, I decided to engage in a dialogue with this text, the result of which is the present essay. In fact, it is an expansion of the notes I made on Klee’s pages as I read them again and again over the years. These notes were later fleshed out with others that had to do with composition in Byzantine art. They were in a sense an indirect answer to some of Klee’s questions, though they came from a different world: that which we call ‘Byzantine art’, with which Klee, along with most of the Western art world in general, was, unfortunately, not sufficiently well acquainted, either as form or discourse.

A. The artist as soul and essence of a work of art.

In his text, Paul Klee in effect speaks continually and almost exclusively about the artist and how he manages to realize the work of art, beginning with and relying upon his own internal experience in dealing with the visual elements (line, tone, color), while also creatively embracing even the serendipitous and unexpected. Everything seems to flow from the artist and his personal experience, from his vision, from his ideas and imaginings and, naturally, it all presupposes a limitless freedom that allows him to create a whole world beyond or alongside the one that now exists around him.

For Klee, the artist is a special, gifted creature who is different from other, ordinary people ‘only from the point of view that he can tame life, using his particular gifts, a creature perhaps happier than those who do not possess the creative urge, nor the opportunity for release by creating forms’.^[1]

In his efforts to sketch clearly and relatively precisely the role and function of the artist, and to describe how the artistic process plays out, Klee uses an image, a simile: that of a tree.

The artist has studied this world of variety and has, we may suppose, unobtrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of a tree. From the root, the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he moulds his vision into his work.

As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space, so with his work.^[2]

Klee remarks that we should not expect complete correspondence between the root and the crown of the tree, between the artist’s experience of the world, that which is within him, and the form acquired by the work of art. ‘Between above and below, there can be no mirrored reflection’.^[3]

“Thine own of thine own we offer thee…”, Egg Tempera on wood, 80×100 cm.

For Klee, it is natural that there should be ‘vital divergences’ between the work of art and the natural form from which it began or was inspired. Klee here defends his visual choices, saying that this divergence is natural and is not related to lack of ability or deliberate distortion, as, it appears, he was charged with by some in his day whose criterion was the demand for complete fidelity to the original form as in nature. Klee defends this alteration, saying that the artist merely transmits that which comes to him from the depths of his soul and that he is no more than a humble channel to whom the beauty of the crown of the tree does not belong.

For Klee however, it is clear that art is the transubstantiated image of nature, with which the artist engages, since this is what he has as his object and which he attempts to present, transformed through his personal experience, with the contribution of pictorial elements that have their own relatively autonomous existence and function. And it is precisely these particular dimensions of the visual elements that ‘necessarily’,^[4] according to Klee, lead to the distortion of the natural form. ‘For therein is nature reborn’.^[5]

These dimensions are initially related to formal factors: line (measure), tone value (weight) and color (quality). These elements are more or less measurable. So vagueness in a work is permissible only when there is a real inner need.^[6] And although the artist attempts to ‘group the formal elements purely and logically’,^[7] a viewer is unable to follow, because, in relation to the work of art that is emerging, he functions by association of ideas, and judges on the basis of the notions he already has in his head and his imagination. According to Klee, however, the artist must continue to function on the basis of rules that must regulate the formal elements.^[8]

Saints Peter and Paul, Egg Tempera on wood, 35×45 cm.

According to Klee, it may be, however, that the artist himself will fall into the temptation of the association of ideas, though these may be accepted provided they are genuine and spontaneous, because, in this way, the work may be enriched with the material from the associations. He says: ‘If the artist is fortunate, these natural forms may fit into a slight gap in the formal composition, as though they had always belonged there’.^[9] It was Klee’s hope and expectation, however, that the viewer who functioned by association of ideas and tried to find only things that he was familiar with in the work of art would disappear and become a ghost,^[10] since he clearly limits and narrows the work of art and its dimensions. The ultimate aim of the pictorial creative process of the artist is that, having progressed through numerous important dimensions, the work would be brought from construction to composition.^[11]

Thereafter, Klee deals with a key topic for art. He attempts to shed light on the issue of the distortion of natural objects. He says that this occurs because the artist does not assign the same importance to natural forms as do the realist critics, because these final forms are not the real stuff of natural creation. According to Klee the artist accepts that the world ‘in its present shape is not the only possible world’.^[12] So he surveys the finished forms that nature places before him and tries to find in reality the process of ‘genesis, rather than the image of nature, the finished product’.^[13]

And he permits himself the thought that this process cannot be complete but is open to eternal genesis. He goes even further, postulating that the form of the world in the future and on other stars will look different again. This reflection is good training for his creative work. This being so, states Klee, the artist must be forgiven if he regards the present state of outward appearances as accidentally fixed in time and space, and as altogether inadequate compared with his own penetrating vision and intense depth of feeling.^[14] So the artist functions in freedom. Not in the sense of a freedom to create other finished forms with which to replace the present or future forms, but to retain the right to develop as nature itself develops.

The Sacrifice of Abraham, Egg Tempera on wood, 40×50 cm.

In this sense, says Klee, chosen is the artist who penetrates to the region of the secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution, the womb of nature, the source of creation where the secret key to all is guarded.^[15] Each should follow where the pulse of his own heart leads, to the source of all things- dreams, ideas or fantasies—from which, through the appropriate artistic means, a work of art is created.^[16]

Works of art become realities that, according to Klee, are destined to lift life out of mediocrity, not only because they add more spirit to the seen, but because they also bring secret visions into the realm of the visible.^[17] All of this must take place with proper creative means so that art does not remain fixated with representation, showing people as they are rather than what they might be. And Klee concludes his notes with the acceptance that the search continues; that some parts have been found but not the whole; and that this is because the people are not following. He and his companions in the community of the Bauhaus are still seeking a people.^[18]

It is clear from this short exposition of his views that, for Klee, the artist sees himself as part of cosmic creation, as a collaborator of ‘God’ and one who continues what the latter began. For the artist to find his place in this process, he has to have propositions and visions. He must first study the world and its forms not so much as completed events but more as a process of evolution, as an everlasting unfolding. He should also be acquainted with the artistic means and their potential, so that he can subject them to his aim of creating a work that will have pictorial integrity and will not seek to represent the external, finished forms of the world—despite the fact that this is what viewers usually want.

A work of art should not represent forms as they are, or seem, but should project a vision, rather than repeating what the eye can already see in the outside world. The work of art should enrich the seen with the vision of another world, which is, however, the vision of the artist. For this reason, the artist has the right to alter the forms of things as he judges best in order to express or describe what he has within himself: his experience, his dream, his vision. In this process, unfortunately, as Klee confesses, the artist is alone—because the recipients of the pictorial works, the viewers, are generally locked into their own associations of ideas and are unable to follow and participate in this new vision. But the artist must continue his work, leaving the ghost and the viewer behind.

The scheme proposed in Klee’s notes is based almost exclusively on the person of the artist and his personal experience. Everything starts with him and from his longing for life, from his studies, from his knowledge, from his vision, from his desire for the freedom to be able to participate in the events unfolding in the world. The artist seems to be the beginning and the end, the very heart of the creative process, because, in the end it is he who is the critic and recipient of this procedure. The viewer simply has to observe the vision and take part in it; he is in no way an organic part of the whole process. His relationship to the work is external and objective. The observer stands outside, far away, face to face with the final product of the artist, which he can either accept or reject. What Klee presents is a system, a scheme of art, which is, however, not new in essence. It comes from the Scholastic Middle Ages and, in particular the Neo-Platonizing aesthetics of the period of the Renaissance, during the course of which the person of the artist became a dominant element in the pictorial creative practice, as it has remained to this day.

If we were to describe this scheme, we would put it as follows:

The artist is the essential element who creates everything. By and large, his task consists of giving form to an underlying content that varies, depending on each instance. This content may be beauty or harmony as qualities of God that belong to the beyond, but are hidden in the structure of things and symbols of this world. They may be philosophical or theological ideas, the feelings of the artist, his fleeting impressions of the world of phenomena, or his ideas and visions of another world. The visual form evolves and is shaped as such in this dialogue with the ‘beyond’ content in each case. It is thus transformed, altered, or distorted commensurately, in order to hold, express, or describe this content. The viewer is a third, non-organic part of this process. He plays no part in the existence and therefore the shaping of the visual form and is not the reference point for the direction and presence of the visual elements.

Saint Maximus the Confessor, Egg Tempera on wood, 40×50 cm.

Saint John the Theologian, Egg Tempera on wood, 35×35 cm.

In terms of graphics, we would say that this scheme, which originated mainly in the Scholastic theology and philosophy of the Western Middle Ages, is flat and one-dimensional and breaks up the unity of the elements and factors that make up the visual, creative activity. The pictorial form is in a dialogue with the content; the artist—who may himself be part of the content—judges and chooses the visual solutions in relation to their appropriateness; and the viewer exists as a third, external reference point who does not, however, participate organically as an internal reason for the shaping of the form. Naturally, he is called upon to have his own separate interaction with the work, to have his own experience from it and his own life. Moreover, there is no place in this scheme for community as community nor for function in the sense of unity thanks to the communion of all things.

It seems that everything is fragmentedly ‘united’ in its discreteness and autonomy, without any internal reason for unity.

B. Composition in Byzantine Painting

The beauty of Klee’s notes and the charm they have always exercised over me is due to the fact that, although they are fragmentary references, they constitute a well-rounded view of the pictorial creative process, a proposal for a visual system. And great was my joy when, after many years, I managed to realize that, speaking of Byzantine painting, we are, in practice, talking about a just as well-rounded pictorial system, with its own internal discourse, including all the factors and components to which it assigns roles and functions. Klee helped me to understand this. And, in turn, Byzantine painting helped me to understand Klee better, to appreciate him and to harness him for my own pictorial purposes.

Hereafter I shall present my thoughts on how things work in the system of Byzantine painting in order for the composition to be created and the work of art to function in society as an event that enriches the world with a vision that is, however, different from that sketched by Klee in his writings.

Byzantine painting is public and social art. As did all ancient art forms, it arose and was shaped in order to function in a society of people, not as a single object or part of a certain group of objects. It arose in order to function within a society, though this did not involve ignoring the specific person who stood before its works.

It was also shaped as a system by society, through its creators, that is its artists, who worked for the community and society. For this reason, many centuries were needed to reach a relative formation with specific characteristics that were also clearly distinct from other plastic languages. They were not the product of a single person and the result of systematic thought. It seems more that they were shaped through the need to find an outlet for expression, that is, for a common experience to find visible form and existence. This is also why there are no satisfactory and analytical records of how this formation came about. What we call Byzantine painting came about through the actual need of the Christian community to visualize, to make visible the experience of life it shared as a community and also as particular individuals, given that Christian ecclesiology has as its fundamental premise the participation of its members in the Eucharist, an experience that is at once communal and individual.

As regards its basic elements, this communal experience might be sketched as follows: the core of life is the Eucharist and the participation of all members in that service, where, above all, the members of the community are united with Christ and among themselves. This happens in the present time, since, according to the Christian faith, at every divine liturgy, with the invocation and descent of the Holy Spirit, the precious gifts (bread and wine) are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The premise for participation is that each believer should live in the fear of God, with faith and love, as Christ himself taught through his words and deeds. The ultimate goal is the union of all, in Christ, and eternal life in the Kingdom of God, where everyone will live united in love and peace.

This communal experience of life sought a visual medium to express and manifest itself, not only as a theme, but also as a visual event, as a pictorial form. This is how what we now call ‘Byzantine Painting’ came about: from the pre-existing pictorial materials and elements of currents in Greco-Roman culture. They used stylistic elements from a variety of trends because these constituted common modes of expression among artists of the time and were functional for as long as the people who lived in those centuries were able to recognize these features as being familiar to them. But the manner in which these features were adopted and put together was unique, and this is due to the fact that they had to express a particular experience of life that was unheard of, which the world had not seen before that time.

At the heart of the visual system that arose lies the matter of composition. Nothing is simple and one-dimensional. Everything is made up of smaller units and elements that, on inspection, must be clearly distinguished and then re-encountered in a new unity with a different internal discourse, as well as a different function and voice. The model for this concept and sense of things is the way in which the person of Christ himself was understood, who, as God and human, had two natures, though not two different existences or hypostases.

Christ the light of the Wolrd, Egg Tempera on wood, 70×100 cm.

With the formulation of Orthodox Christology, it became clear that the two natures in which Christ participated in one hypostasis do not change or transform, are not confused or separated in the union. They are a single mode of being, each retaining its own characteristics.

In the same way, in painting, every thing is treated as a composition of elements and not as a single entity thing has only one feature and only one dimension. The way in which the persons in the various ‘Interpretations’ of art that were in circulation in Byzantium are described are proof of this concept. In these interpretations, people are described as a totality of characteristics, as a unique coming together of discrete elements, as a compilation of attributes.

Everything, therefore, is treated as a composite object made up of parts and elements that must be united among themselves in a way analogous to the person of Christ: that is unchangeable, unconfused, and indivisible, one form, so that they constitute a unity with a common raison d’être and a commensurate function. It is precisely this foundation that created a visual system in which all the components and factors find roles and functions that are analogous to them.

The artist and his world cannot be the central and dominant factors in visual creation, nor can he be the final criterion for things, that is, the reason for the composition himself. Without losing his own person, he has to function within the context of a public form of art that serves the community and has a corresponding and analogous purpose.

a. The subject

In the Byzantine painting tradition, the artist does not seek his subject randomly in nature, whether this is understood as external, manifest reality, or as an abstract essence. Nor does he seek to give form and visual realization to his experience of the world of tangible objects, or to manifest his feelings, ideas, or fancies in a visual manner. He does not attempt to show the invisible or to embellish the visible with his own spirit and visions about what the world should be like.

The task of the Byzantine artist starts from the visible and is accomplished, principally, by enabling the viewer to participate and share in it. In other words: to render in a visual manner the relationship the viewer can have with the subject depicted. His theme is not the subject per se, nor the forms of nature in themselves, nor the vision of a possible future form for them, nor, of course, the fleeting impressions left on the senses by the mutation and continuous flow of things. The theme and subject of the Byzantine artist is how things exist in a relationship of an equal communion of love. What he is called upon to do, even when he is recording a seemingly simple object, such as a twig, or a rock in the sea, is to depict how, as a pictorial occurrence, such a form can show the ‘idyllic’ state of things: in other words, can show things as a relationship of unity with all else.

And since all things are not there present, the artist has, in the first place, to analyze the object and make it a composite, an aggregation, that is, of discrete and extrinsic elements. Then, when he paints, he has to bring all these elements and components into a form of common existence, which will reveal both how each small element is reconciled and pacific and also that they exist in a loving relationship of communion. In this way, through the act of painting, an object becomes a universal occurrence that speaks of the whole of nature and is no longer a fraction of reality that speaks only of its own small, insignificant existence.

The theme of the Byzantine artist is to record the disposition of beings to exist in communion. Beyond the external characters there is an energy and, even more, a development, a raison d’être as communion.

There are, of course, times when the artist, either as a person or as a representative of the community for whom he is working, adds narrative elements to his subject and makes visible ideas and interpretations about things and events. Or he puts in other embellishing features that are important only to him. This is desirable and acceptable provided these features do not undo his work, do not have an independent meaning, and do not dominate in such a manner that the work no longer has a public function and raison d’être for the community. This danger is persistent and the temptation for the artist is always lurking with his every action, since, in his creation, he does not have the security of referring to a natural form that he is copying. The artist must remain focused on his mission and sacrifice something of his subject and himself for the sake of his work and his operation. This does not, of course, mean that he should deny his heart and paint without feeling or life. He has to function on behalf of others, but in a heartfelt manner.

If the artist wishes to operate within the context of the Byzantine tradition, he has to look beyond the forms, to become deaf to the sirens who tempt him to seek visions related to the existence of beings and the world. He has to stop being concerned with the essence of things and their true nature. He has to focus on relations and how beings exist in communion, in society. His task is more along the lines of ecclesiology than ontology. He speaks by painting what the relations between things are, rather than what the things actually are or should be.

The temptation of such a concentration on essence was overcome in the Christian East from as early as the great Cappadocian fathers, who distinguished between essence and energies, between shareable energies and the unshareable essence of God. These distinctions indirectly laid the foundations for another kind of culture that aimed more at what this participation in energies is and what sort of relations are involved, rather than the intellectual understanding of the existence of beings. True knowledge is participation in the other through sharing their energies and is therefore a real experience and not merely a logical categorization.

This kind of thinking was also applicable to the painting that arose from a community with such philosophical premises, to what is known as Byzantine art. As St Theodore the Studite was to say during the iconoclast controversy, what is painted and depicted is not the nature but the hypostasis of things. Painting has to do with the hypostasis, the mode of being, rather than with the essence. This is why an icon shows something or someone and does not aim to describe what this something or someone is. The painter does not record the essence of beings nor how things should be. Painting shows that they exist and in what state they exist; it shows their mode of being and not what they are in essence. Let me say again, painting is ecclesiology, not ontology.

As Klee did, we can use an image to explain what the Byzantine artist depicts and what his main mission is. In Klee’s thinking, an artist starts from an internal experience that is formless and therefore invisible (the root of the tree) and goes on to create the crown of the tree, which is a shape and therefore a visible feature.

In Byzantine painting, this is not the main mission of the artist. Here the painter seems to begin his work standing before a canvas on which the world is spread out, in the various forms in which life is expressed. His task, let me say again, is not to create a new world from the beginning, nor to make another world of forms that would conform to his inner needs. In the main, his task consists of ‘stretching’ the canvas, of spreading it skillfully around the viewer so that the form depicted on it is no longer opposite, but rather that the viewer lives within it. The task of the painter is to make what is depicted accessible to everyone. Through his pictorial practice, he is to make the work of art something that is no longer an object to the viewer but a present space and time, in which what is depicted encounters viewers and is united to them. It is a field of the energy of love, on which is realized the communion of beings, present and absent, viewers and creators. Starting from a specific, objective, visible form that exists within its own coordinates of space and time, the work of art is transformed into another reality and becomes a form of another order, which has different dimensions and, in particular, possesses the capacity of being open, available and communicable to everyone.

Saint Gregory the Byzantine, Egg Tempera on wood, 64×64 cm.

b. The transformation of forms

In order for this transformation to occur, the artist intervenes in the natural form, actively but not arbitrarily. He does not intervene with his own criteria, nor does he allow his personal wishes and appetites to change the form. Were this the case, all that would result would be a distortion of the form, from which would arise an expressionistic type of visual representation and form. The Byzantine artist functions communally and has faith in the experience of the past masters who preceded him and who, in their time, worked on the reality of people’s senses. So his interventions have a functional character rather than a self-descriptive one. Initially he breaks down the form of the person depicted into components, following the natural lines and anatomy of beings. He later removes elements and trims the forms in order to smooth the patterns of the components so that they work together. Thereafter he rearranges all the features so that they acquire common discourse and energy and thus become a communion of love.

The Byzantine artist does not reproduce what viewers would see in the world around them. The forms in his work seem altered and changed, which is why, if viewers are not trained to follow the relations and to enjoy the rhythm that governs the internal relations of the components of an icon, they may often, if not always, be taken aback and react, because they operate by association, with nature and its obvious forms as their reference point. Byzantine forms seem wrong to them and strange, odd, and ugly. This is because they cannot see the relationships, enjoy them and be moved by the rhythm of the arrangement in the icon.

In Byzantine art, everything works through the realism of the senses, especially sight and the feeling of movement. Since the desired goal is to achieve communion between the icon—the person depicted—and the viewers, this means in practical terms that the latter have to share some energy that flows from the work of art. The work of art cannot be simply a detached object that lives in its own time and place and faithfully or otherwise reproduces a frozen moment in the past. The work has to become an energy that acts on viewers, encounters them and unites with them. In turn, viewers must take a commensurate action of acceptance and reception of the energy of the work of art.

Saint Maximus of Kavsokalyvia, Egg Tempera on wood, 47×64 cm.

Since there is a need of energies, everything in Byzantine art occurs through movement. Movement is the basic tool of expression, whether this comes from line (its qualities and relationships) or color (quality and tone and their relationships). Everything is understood and evaluated as movements. And the basic aim is how to handle these movements and actions in such a way as to ensure what we describe above: the union of everything in a reality in which the work of art becomes part of the actual and the actual is transfigured and elevated into a work of art.

Historically, the artists and artisans who shaped and gave its final form to the system of Byzantine painting trusted in their tradition, that is their Greek visual heritage, of which they used one of the most significant discoveries of the ancient Greeks, rhythm, to the fullest extent.

Rhythm, which derives from the Greek verb ‘to flow’, is the skillful management of the movements that evolve and exist in a work of art in such a way as to realize a sense of dynamic balance and to bring the work into a state in which there is movement in stasis and stasis in movement. In this way, with the appropriate handling of the forces and movements in the work, it participates simultaneously in movement (time) and also stability (transcendence of time, eternity).

For this to happen, the static balance has to be destroyed and, therefore, so must the symmetry that negates any movement and produces staticity. Everything in the composition must become asymmetrical in order to acquire movement and to remain in such a dis-position. Thus, although the proportions become asymmetric, at the same time the horizontal and vertical axes are abolished, since they are synonymous with stasis. All the elements are now placed in ‘saltire’ axes and therefore in movement, which balances each one against the other.

In this way a ‘state’ of dynamic balance is achieved: everything moves together, each courses along inside the other. This results in the realization of rhythm, a reality that transcends every state, which is by nature a finished and definite product, and also transcends the two stable extremes of time (moment and eternity). Rhythm brings everything into a continuous unfurling, where everything exists in an everlasting present and an amorous encounter beyond the narrow concepts of completed time and narrow confines of space. Through rhythm, the work of art is transformed from an object into a cosmic event, since it has features that show that it now shares in the unfolding of the cosmos.

Saint Theofilos of Pantocratoros Monastery, Egg Tempera on wood, 37×40 cm.

Byzantine artists embraced the achievement of rhythm and based upon it their ambition to realize a work of art that would no longer be an object, but a reality of communion in which the absent, what is depicted, would meet the present, the viewers. They depended on rhythm and assigned to it more roles and dimensions than had been the case until then.

But if we are to understand how this new role of rhythm occurs and how a composition is realized in Byzantine art, we must speak about their basic elements and the way in which they function. Only then can we proceed on relatively sound bases.

c. The pictorial elements.

As with all painting, the pictorial elements are line, color, and the relationship between them.

Paul Klee says that line is a measurable value. But in Byzantine art, this element seems not to be measurable. This is for two reasons: although line is a clear and obvious element, when it is drawn it must appear that it has no beginning or end. It seems to come from somewhere but does not end anywhere. It hints at moving on elsewhere. When it is well drawn, it seems as if it is the manifestation in place and time of an infinite thing which simply appears in order to say something but does not end there. In Byzantine script, a line is not a fragment, but an action which passes through and unites things in its passing, recapitulates qualities and goes on elsewhere, perhaps everywhere or nowhere, to wherever time ends and evolution reigns. Line in Byzantine painting is like the wind. It comes, it brings values and leaves, transporting what it has taken and then returning. A perpetual motion of life.

This is why a line is not measurable. But it is not measurable for another reason, as well. In Byzantine painting, which properly follows the basic principles of the system, a line exists at the border which lies at the fringes of color and everything related to it. It should never be separated in a way that makes it independent and capable of measurement. Line is always thought of as the boundary of color, just as color is conceived as an entity that always exists in a hypostasis that is given form by line.

Since this is how things are, we can say that line cannot be measured. We know that it exists because of its results, but we cannot define it completely and therefore we cannot control it.

Color. Color is quality and tone. A red, for example, is quality; but this quality can exist in many tones, in an infinite relationship with ‘shade’, that is, light. In this sense, color as a quality does not exist per se, but always in connection with light. It exists as regards; therefore, it is a relationship; as such it is movement—and thus energy.

In Byzantine painting, everything is conceived as energy, and this is how it functions. So color has an analogous role and clearly functions as a feature that, creating the third dimension of the object, connects the elements of the shape and, in the end, refers the shape to the senses of the viewer.

Initially, since the aim of the painter is to bring the subject into his present dimensions and make it shareable and communicable to the viewer, there can be no independent artistic time and space behind his work. This important discovery of Renaissance art, which assisted in the creation of masterpieces, can have no place here and is abandoned. Perspective, with its rules and consequences, is not valid. The work of art ends or begins on its surface and extends towards the reality of the viewer, towards him and his dimensions. This is why color does not have a decorative, nor merely a semiotic-semantic role, but one that is mainly constructive. The forms are built with colors conceived as qualities and, at the same time, tones. Warm chromatic qualities are contrasted with others that are cool, and dark ones with light-colored, simultaneously. In this way, a pulse, a motion is produced on the pictorial surface that is connected to the individual elements that make up the whole, while at the same time moving everything towards the viewer.

Indeed, the classic practice of laying a cool, bright tone of lighting effects on darker (lower tone), warm underpaintings aims at precisely this projection of the subject towards the viewer. The aim of the plasticity is not simply to give the viewer the feeling that the subject has mass and, therefore, weight, and is real, but rather it principally aspires to move the subject towards where the viewer stands. This is why it does not keep to what the eye sees in nature; it does not follow some proper prescription.

In Renaissance realism, color creates mass by removing the darker parts to the background. The addition of black is enough for something like this, since the presence of black takes away light, and the surface becomes less active. This means that it moves more slowly as regards the feeling of the viewer. In this way, the impression is given of the existence of depth in the color, precisely as is the case with the perspective plan of work, where the centrifugal forces create the background, that is the autonomous, virtual pictorial space behind the surface of the painting.

In the chromatic rationale of the Impressionists, the use of black was abandoned, though not the understanding of the function of plasticity as the rendition of depth and weight. Here, too, plasticity aims at showing mass and the rendition of the reality of the subject. It simply occurs on more chromatic terms. The rationale, however, remains the same. The chromatic structure aims at the reproduction of the ‘real’ rather than the achievement of a relationship between the subject and the viewer. But with color and the perspective scheme, the painting remains an object, as regards the perception of the viewer.

In the rationale of Byzantine art, color always starts from a warm underpainting, a warm and quite darkly colored undercoat on which will be built the plasticity, which is not connected either to some source of external lighting or to the imitation of apparent reality. The Byzantine painter is free to dare to use whatever chromatic combinations he wishes, provided these serve the needs of his work. If, for example, there is pictorial need, the sea may be red, without this necessarily indicating the existence of some related significance or meaning. The choice is made on visual criteria. That is, where there is a need for the existence of a warm color at that point in the work, in order to communicate with a cool one to achieve the rhythmic management of the work, the sea can become red. In this case, the artist forgets his associations from nature, overcomes any likely objections on the part of viewers who do not understand the reason behind such a choice, and saves his composition and the integrity of its function.

Plasticity in Byzantine painting is not merely the rendition of mass, which gives relative weight to things and a sense that they are participating in the world of perceptible things. Plasticity mainly and fundamentally functions as an energy that flows from the surface and contributes to the realization of the rhythm, therefore to the establishment of relations between the subject and the viewer. This is why plasticity is considered to be movement and is understood as an energy flowing out from the surface and moving towards the dimension of the viewers. This movement is always a counterweight to the movement of the subject. In a figure arranged with the rationale of counterpose, the body will be ‘illumined’, that is formed, on the opposite side from the head, which has the opposite movement.

People who are not accustomed to the logic of Byzantine painting and who think and feel with the terms of naturalism, often see an erroneous handling of light in Byzantine painting. Or they note that there are two sources of light. In reality, there is no source of light. The painter does not work in terms of apparent reality but in those of the science of painting, which sees in plasticity not the reproduction of external phenomena but rather actions and movements and relationships and the unity of things in a continual development.

When the Byzantine painter creates the forms of his works, he serves unity, he connects the pieces of a broken world in an immutable, unconfused, and indivisible manner so that the painting may become testimony to another reality of life, in which everything can exist in a relationship of communion, equivalent reconciliation, peace and love.

d. The artist as person and creator

So far we’ve described the role of the Byzantine artist as a creator who was concerned primarily with the public function of his work, leaving his person, his own needs and desires out of the artistic process. His interest was focused mainly on the structure of the work and how that structure contributed to the achievement of the organic unity between the individual elements and to the realization of its projection towards and union with the viewer. In his concern over attaining this function, he often, if not always, forgot himself and bypassed the innate and natural inclination of all artists to express their heart through their work.

In particular, when the Byzantine artist was called upon to paint for large communities of people and to present ‘their mythology’, the issue of function was of even greater concern to him. Even more so when his painting was of large, monumental dimensions (wall-painting). In such instances he had very little room for allowing his person to appear in his work, since that could taint the function of the work and make it less legible, or approachable and, therefore, unfunctional.

And yet, in these instances, as also when he was called upon to paint freely subjects that were not linked exclusively to a community and ‘its mythology’, the artist was obliged to make his work the locus and means of expression of his person, too. Everything had to be imbued with the particular fragrance of his heart and mind. Otherwise the work would be an impersonal construct and would be soulless, that is without the breath of life that an artistic creation must have.

Even when a Byzantine artist worked at a time when style had already been formed through a multitude of circumstances and in particular conditions (social, political, theological, and philosophical), he had to find his way, to breathe freely and to express himself in a personal way, though without, of course departing much from the aesthetic ideals and trends of his time. It was enough to find his way to his heart and his personal experience and to dip his charcoal, his brush, the whole of his artistic creativity in it. His work would then become a personal deposition, as opposed to nothing more than a good or average copy of the structure and style of other painters.

For the Byzantine painting tradition, style or genre is the particular manner in which artists manage the system so that they realize the function of their work. The genre is not identified with the system, which mainly supports the structure of the elements of the work, nor, of course, can the system per se exist without some genre. These two dimensions co-exist and occur simultaneously. But they are discrete elements that one can see, provided the history of Byzantine painting is studied with the appropriate method. The genre, however, is the hypostasis, as regards a substance-system that is stable and unaltered in its basic elements and gives cohesion and unity to different stylistic trends in Byzantine painting. Although genre, precisely like hypostasis, bears the same essence, it is always unique and inimitable, and this is what makes it valuable and important. It proves it to be an incontrovertible testimony to the quality of eras and persons.

Style need not, of course, be a personal matter for each artist. The artist may be born into a genre, given that he was born and grew up in a time that had particular characteristics, whatever his personal feelings on the matter. But even when a Byzantine artist was born into an established style, he would still have to find his own signature, his own creative inspiration, and would have to breathe with it. Only then would his work be vital, a true witness of things, rather than dry information and, in the end, an empty form that simply floated through time without touching upon people’s experience and its riches.

The creative inspiration of the Byzantine artist is necessary and indispensable. And this is what he would carry in his soul: what he experienced and did not experience, either because he could not attain it or chose not to attain it. The artist’s creative inspiration was shaped by the manner in which he interacted with people, by the places and things that were to be found around him, by his era in general, by the ideas in which he believed, and by the good and bad that had marked him. This creative, inventive inspiration would, in the end, give life to his work and make it, beyond its functional structure, a unique testament within the undertaking of human history to the love of the person, to existence, and life as communion.

Saint Stylianos, Egg Tempera on wood, 25×35 cm.

c. Composition. Beauty as liturgy

It has often been said that Byzantine art, interpreted as a kind of expressionism, conveys (in the sense of description) a transcendent content of the beyond, the result of which is modification of the forms depicted. This content has been described in a variety of ways by different students of Byzantine painting, sometimes as the image of God in human beings, as the eschatological state of the figures, the actual sanctity of the subjects, the uncreated divine energies, and, sometimes, even as God himself.

Through these interpretations, an attempt is made to explain the why and how of the alteration of things in Byzantine painting, which, in accordance with the interpretations we mentioned above at least, does not aim at capturing and reproducing the beauty of the world as it appears to the eyes of the body, but another kind of beauty, that of the Kingdom of Heaven. An icon, then, is not beautiful by secular standards, but is so because it expresses a transcendental, spiritual content by making it visible.

There are no sources to support such a view, which, in any case, seems problematical if it is projected onto the broader framework of Orthodox theology, where we never encounter this kind of cataphatic theology, which seems to have more in common with scholastic, philosophical/theological models. The Neo-Platonic tone of aesthetics that developed in the West after the Renaissance is, moreover, very close to such an approach.

Where we can agree, however, is that Byzantine art does not aim at rendering the apparent view of things and their beauty by following some analogous ideal of beauty often based on mathematical calculations. In Byzantine painting, beauty is not an abstract aesthetic ideal, but a function. Beauty is function and the images (with a religious theme or not) of Byzantine painting do not describe a content of the beyond in pictorial language, but record an ecclesiology, a form of communion of things, a Church of unity and love, a way of life.

Beauty as function

To Paul Klee’s way of thinking, an artist, with the spiritual experience of life that he has and his vision of the world, is called upon, through a visual construct, to achieve a composition in which things are organized and exist in such a way as to render perceptible his vision and to show this progression of the world towards the eternal state of affairs. For Klee, composition is a personal matter.

In Byzantine painting, the composition of things takes place with a different perspective and different terms. Everything is arranged so as to achieve a function, with unity as its chief characteristic. And this is the beauty of Byzantine painting: a function of things in order to realize the vision of the unity of all, with the person of Christ as the model of reference, in a manner that is immutable, unconfused, and indivisible.

I shall draw two examples from nature to explain better what takes place in Byzantine painting and to demonstrate, at the same time, how close this visual road is to the reason of nature. One example has to do with shapes. The other with colors.

The rocks of the sea. The pebbles of the sea came to be found there—it matters not how. They were found there and had necessarily to exist together. One next to the other. In a community. The difficulty was that an external factor kept appearing, the water of the sea, with its force, and disturbed their positions. They damaged each other with their sharp sides and were unable to find their proper position because they had protrusions which did not fit into those of the neighboring pebbles. There was only one way and this they took since, as pebbles, they did not have autonomy and were unable to resist nature and its actions. They became smooth and so lost their individuality, their mismatched indentations and protrusions. And so their shapes, while not being completely lost, became more abstract and simple and thus could more easily find a place next to the neighboring pebbles when the external factor arrived suddenly and violently and forced them to rearrange their positions and therefore their relationships. Now, after the cleansing of centuries, perhaps millennia, the pebbles rolled over each other and easily reached an accommodation each time with the others; it was not difficult for them to continually create a new community of relationships. The action of the water was not a torment that caused ‘pain’ and effort, but a pleasure, since it continually gave the opportunity for ceaseless reorganization, an enduringly new relationship with other pebbles. The pebbles were in an everlasting function and in the beauty that this involves.

Something of the same order happens in Byzantine painting. Things come together on a surface, with their basic feature being their specific shape, by which they are distinguished and known. In order for these shapes to achieve unity among themselves, and for this unity to include the viewer as well, they have to be smoothed and to lose their distinctive protrusions and indentations, that is all the details of shape that are an obstacle to their relationship of unity. Thus, with the creative intervention of the artist, a cleansing of the shapes is achieved, and they become simpler through a process of abstraction. This abstraction, however, is not aimed at expressing some spiritual content. It is a functional move, directed at making the shapes able to relate to one another and constitute a unit. So the cleansing must always occur in a way that is a reference to the other shape, that with which the relationship will be established.

Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh in the Middle of the Night”,
egg tempera on wood panel, 51×98 cm.

Theotokos, Glykofilousa, Egg Tempera on wood, 40×50 cm.

Look, for example, at the way the outline of the hair of Christ or Our Lady is achieved. All the ends are removed so that the head that is delineated by this outline/shape can be united to the circle of the halo which is the neighboring shape of reference for the head.

Beauty as a function of the shapes is aimed at the unity of all things, at the declaration that life is a communion of unity and love.

Wild flowers. The flowers of the field have to exist and their existence depends in large part on insects that transport their pollen and thus promote pollination and fertilization. The insects transport the grains of pollen from the anthers to the stigmas of the hyper of the flowers. In order to attract insects, to get them to come, the flowers use colors and their relationships. Colors often exist in flowers in contrasts between warm and cool and dark and light. It is usual for these two pairs to co-exist. A cold dark color, for example, will be next to a light, warm one. In this way there is a dialectic of tones and colors/qualities that attracts insects and enables life to function. The blossoms of the flowers are beautiful and the reason for this beauty is the function of life. The same is true of the fruits of trees and their fragrance, but perhaps we need not expand further.

In Byzantine painting, color has a similar structure and function. As I have already mentioned, the rationale of the Impressionists as regards complementary colors does not apply to Byzantine painting, despite the fact that one can see analogous relationships in images produced with the rationale of the Byzantine masters. The structure of the colors follows precisely what is to be found in nature. Counterpoint between warm and cool and light and dark colors. For this reason, and in order to stand out, the most important person in a church, Christ, is robed in garments with the strongest possible counterpoint. Blue and red, the warmest warm contrasted with the coolest cool, and so the person of Christ is easily distinguished from the others.

The function of the colors, beauty as function. The ecclesiology of the visual elements. All of these serve the unity of all things, with regard to the feelings of the viewers, who are a reference point and organic end-point of the painting, and not a third external factor who is simply invited to interact with the work of art.

In this way, the work of art ceases to be a private vision of the world, a self-legitimizing masterpiece by an inspired person, and becomes an organic component of life, since it deals with visual terms and, on the level of the feelings, the unity of all things, the essence of life itself as the communion of beings.

Skhinokapsala, Lasithi, 5 August 2020

^[1] p. 11 (11). All references are to Über moderne Kunst, Verlag Bentali Bern-Bümpliz 1945. The first page number is to the original German edition, the one in brackets to the English translation, which is available for free on the internet at cupdf.com_paul-klee-on-modern-art-faber-and-faber.pdf.

^[2] pp. 11-13 (13)

^[3] p. 13 (13). It is interesting at this point to note that, in order to speak about the relationship between experience and visual expression, Klee uses terms of space. He talks about above (the external form of the work) and below (the internal experience). This vertical or, better, ascending understanding, which relates to a metaphysical interpretation of things, may, perhaps, be gleaned from his philosophical premises. Or it may simply be a spontaneous expression that reflects the general, established understanding of things in Western culture, which, in large measure, springs from the Scholastic modus cogitandi of the Western medieval period.

^[4] p. 17 (19)

^[5] p. 19 (19)

^[6] p. 23 (25)

^[7] p. 29 (31)

^[8] p. 29 (31)

^[9] p. 31 (33)

^[10] p. 31 (33)

^[11] p. 41 (43)

^[12] p. 43 (45)

^[13] p. 43 (45)

^[14] p. 45 (47)

^[15] p. 47 (51)

^[16] p. 47 (51)

^[17] p. 49 (51)

^[18] p. 53 (55)

Beauty as Liturgy

Composition in Byzantine Painting;
A Dialogue with Paul Klee*

Georgios Kordis

Former Assistant Professor,
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens;
Iconographer, Painter