The eyes of Marko Rupnik: black "soulless" holes?
The eyes are the "alpha and omega" of (real) Byzantine art
Why does this face bother us so much?
Do you feel vaguely threatened by it? Disquieted? Does it seem just “wrong” somehow? We’re going to take a careful, analytical look at it to figure out what’s wrong based on the standard Byzantine canonical forms for iconography.
All will become clear.
Whenever the subject of Marko Rupnik’s work comes up on social media, people always talk about the “black soulless eyes” or the “black voids” for eyes that are the stand-out feature of his style. People feel this instinctively; we look at this kind of work and even if we know nothing about Byzantine sacred art, we can feel there is something off about this depiction; it’s wrong at a visceral level.
They’re “demonic,” is the thing you hear most often in comments on Twitter and Facebook. I get a little exasperated by this and always feel like saying, “OK, cool your jets, people; Hollywood has invented the ‘black eyes = demons’ trope for you. Real life isn’t the X-files and not everything we don’t like is demons.” But at the same time, there’s a good reason the movie/TV industry has adopted the trope. Certain physiological changes show in the pupillary response, and generate a threat-response in the viewer. We’ll talk about that.
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Rupnik’s art isn’t “medieval” or Byzantine. It’s not really even based on those forms. In fact, it’s a parody of them. It is a visual expression of the modern sophisticate’s bigotry against the rational, orderly and theologically oriented medieval mind; a sneer and a nasty snicker up the sleeve. His is the kind of mind that assumes that order and freedom and rationality were invented in the 18th century, Enlightenment developments of the Renaissance return to Classical Greek and Roman thought, unknown to primitive and superstitious medievals.