Lies the Renaissance told you Pt. 1

The reason you probably don't like Byzantine Icons

The infant John the Baptist, detail of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (National Gallery version)

When most western Christians think of sacred art, they will usually think of something like this. Leonardo da Vinci’s name enjoys a semi-deified connotation in our minds, associated with the very pinnacle of mastery in the High Renaissance. It almost seems like a blasphemy to us to speak a word of critique, let alone criticism. (So, here goes…)

I’ve been mulling over how to explain to western Christians (“Latins”) what sacred art was before the Renaissance, and why it was a fundamentally different idea from the one we have now. Why “realism” isn’t what they think it is, and that Byzantine icons look like that on purpose and not because they are “primitive” forms. Byzantine painting, with its flat, linear almost cartoon-like symbolic forms and its lack of mathematical “3D” perspective, seems “stiff” and lifeless, remote and unrelatable to us.

But here’s a fun-fact: Eastern Christians don’t think of them that way at all. In the early days of the Byzantine empire, the art was praised for being astonishingly lifelike and lively. This was said especially of the mosaic icons of the great cathedral of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia.

So how did the perspective of our spiritual ancestors change so radically?

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Before I get on with the rest of this week’s Saturday post, some updates:

I’m very happy to report that my recent fund-raising effort - and re-launch of this Substack - was a success and I want to thank those who donated, and especially who signed up to be monthly supporters. The month’s shelter expenses are covered, plus a bit for groceries; we’re doing OK over here. But for me it’s about even more than having my rent covered; it’s about creating a community, a team so to speak.

When you’re working in isolation every day, it’s too easy to fall into the habit of thinking you’re the only one who cares about what you’re doing. It’s just you and the computer, or you and the painting. In reality this is almost never true for anyone, and especially not for me, but it’s the kind of thing your brain does when your work necessitates spending a lot of time by yourself.

So, a big priority for me is to create not only ongoing support materially, but a sense of being in this with other people. I spent many years working remotely but with a large group of people, editors, fellow-writers and reporters. It’s been a while now since I’ve had that sense of community, and I really wanted it back.

It’s not just about having support for keeping going, but having a sense of being accountable to real people. That accountability means that it is actually a big deal if I miss a deadline and don’t post the promised twice a week; it means I’ve broken a promise I made to specific people. And it means that I know there are people out there who appreciate my work enough to pay for it directly, to help me keep doing it.

So, now I’ve got a team back, eleven people who signed up to be not just donors but patrons, in the old sense. This covers the rent plus a bit. And I was thinking about ways to make this relationship a little more concrete and active, and came up with the idea for a private chat group, open by invitation, for patrons, regular supporters and friends.

I’ve set up the group on Signal, a messaging platform with excellent reputation for privacy and security. Only people specifically invited can join, so the guest list will be limited to patrons, commissioning clients and customers and people who support me regularly, the group of ladies who help with specialty art supplies and friends who have helped with sensible business advice and collaboration. In other words, a team and community who have helped make this project happen.

In a week or so we’re going to Florence to visit San Marco - the monastery where Fra Angelico lived and worked - and we will be taking a side trip up to Cortona to see his great masterwork, the Cortona Altarpiece:

New monthly subscribers - just $10/month - will receive a link to a private post explaining the idea and giving instructions, with an invitation link to the group. If you’d like to join us, click this button, which will take you to my studio blog, linked to PayPal:

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Christ Pantocrator - literally, “ruler of everything”. St. Catherine Monastery, Sinai Desert, Egypt. 6th or 7th century.

Why don’t we like Byzantine icons?

Most western Christians - those from the Latin or Roman branch of Christianity - often say they don’t like or can’t really relate to (what we call for shorthand) Byzantine iconography. I felt much the same when I started my icon painting class three years ago. I only signed up for it because I wanted some formal training in the technique of egg tempera painting - just how to handle the materials. I didn’t care much about Byzantine style sacred art; I felt like it was flat and lifeless and too stylised to really “speak” to me.

Italo-Byzantine Madonna and Child, Basilica of St. Clare, Assisi. Mid-13th century by the “Master of St. Clare”. Photo by me.

But that class started to break down my difficulties, and I have had a full turn-around since then as I learned more and allowed the new (ancient) aesthetic sink into my brain. And I’ve heard other people say the same thing happened to them. What we didn’t understand we couldn’t appreciate.

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Renaissance naturalistic humanism deformed our ideas about sacred art

Icon of St. Joseph. Egg tempera and gold leaf on panel. By me. My first go at Byzantine style painting, completed 2020.

There’s more to this than mere cultural differences in aesthetics between East and West. In a sense with the Renaissance, its “rebirth” of Greek aesthetics and deep dive into naturalism, the relationship between Christianity and art was permanently deformed. And this deformation of the purpose and nature of sacred art ultimately deformed our religious minds as well. We can thank the Renaissance for the abandonment in the West of the canons of traditional sacred art, and the elevation of Naturalism and Humanism above Christian spirituality in art.

Catholics often say that we do not have adequate, canonical iconographic depictions of the Sacred Heart. But there’s a good reason: it’s a devotion that gained currency centuries after the decline of authentic sacred iconography in the West, the take-over of the western Christian mind by naturalism and humanism, almost unnoticed.

So now we only have modern, naturalistic depictions, often heavily sentimentalised.

This is where western Naturalism has led. 500 years down the line.

And this repellent style of art is more or less where we’ve got stuck. Since the division of the Church into two warring camps in the mid-20th century, the “conservatives” have championed this appalling stuff because it represents the “traditional” art of the moment just before the collapse of unity of doctrinal orthodoxy, and the takeover by theological and aesthetic Modernism. But… really? Is this drizzling, effeminate French 19th century sentimentalism - called “Art de Saint-Sulpice” - really what we have to like if we want to be traditional?

How did we get to the point where our only choices are between late-stage humanistic naturalism and …

… whatever all this is?

Why don't Orthodox Christians like Western sacred art?

Angel of the Annunciation, Simone Martini, 1333. Academic at historians in the west call the Trecento (14th century) Italian painting a transitional period, insignificant on its own merits. They also call it the “Proto-Renaissance” which shows you where their biases lead.

One way to learn the reason western Christians don’t like eastern icons, is to learn why eastern Christians don’t like our naturalistic Renaissance-derived art.

Here is a blog post by Stephane Rene, an iconographer who works in the traditional Coptic (Egyptian/Ethiopian) style, who sums it up : "Orthodox iconography vs. Renaissance art." The issue he says, in a nutshell, is naturalism vs. symbolism, a dichotomy that western Christians have all but forgotten exists.

He writes that the Renaissance artists’…

…fascination for realism and the natural world, the introduction of receding perspective in painting engendered a new kind of art, fundamentally different, and at the opposite pole of iconography… [The innovation of linear perspective allowed them to] create an optical illusion of three dimensionality, 3D in modern terms. Hence Renaissance artists became masters at creating optical illusions of the temporal world.

It is noteworthy that many contemporary Byzantine iconographers refer to western naturalism as “illusionism” because the attempt is to create an illusion that the painting is a kind of window showing past events in the world, as photographs do.

Western illusionistic naturalism, they maintain, focuses on the external appearance of earthly, temporal reality, not on supernatural, spiritual reality that can only be rendered visible through symbolic visual language. That symbolic language is what the “canons” of Byzantine art are, and what the west abandoned in the 15th century.

This shift, Rene says, “engendered a new kind of art, fundamentally different, and at the opposite pole of iconography. This radically changed the previously sacred and symbolic character of Western Christian art.” 

This is the true enormity of the change from Byzantine and Byzantine-influenced medieval sacred painting to the naturalism and neoclassicism of the Renaissance - not merely a development of painting techniques and styles, but a genuine civilisational shift. And it is why the Byzantine Christian world today continues to reject it for specifically religious, theological reasons.  

Rene follows the thought of the Eastern Orthodox world when he says this…

potent mix of perspective and realism with the newly discovered oil medium as a replacement for the traditional egg tempera, accelerated the demise of sacred iconography in the Christian West.

Strong stuff.

Click here for Part 2

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