WE HALTED on the way out of the village to look into a small church. It was built of massive stone slabs, an empty oblong with a battered wooden iconostasis, pervaded by an atmosphere of dereliction and dust. The walls were covered with extraordinary frescoes.
Very often, wandering in the wilder parts of Greece, the traveller is astonished in semi-abandoned chapels where the liturgy is perhaps only sung on the yearly feast of the eponymous saint, by the beauty of the colouring of the wall-paintings and the subtlety with which the painter has availed himself of the sparse elbow-room for private inspiration that the formulae of Byzantine iconography allow him: a convention so strict that it was finally codified by a sixteenth-century painter-monk called Dionysios of Phourna. He formalized the tradition of centuries into an iconographic dogma and deviation became, as it were, tantamount to schism. He it was who made the army of saints and martyrs and prophets identifiable at once by certain unvarying indices—the cut and growth of saints’ beards, their fall in waves or ringlets, their smooth flow or their shagginess, their bifurcation or their parting into two or three or five. He regulated—it was more the ratification of old custom than the launching of new fiats—the wings that anomalously spring from the shoulder blades of St. John Prodromos, and placed his head on a charger in his hands as well as on his neck.[1] He stipulated the angle at which a timely sapling, springing from the ground, should redeem the nakedness of St. Onouphrios from scandal and ordained that Jonah should be seated sadly beneath a gourd hanging from the trellis he built outside the walls of Nineveh, holding a scroll inscribed with the words: “Lelypemai epi ti kolokynthi sphodra eos thanatou”—“I have had pity on the gourd, even unto death.”
Above their regulation beards and their ineluctable attributes, the saints gaze from the iconostasis and the walls of the narthex and the katholikon with a strange, blank, wide-eyed fixity, and behind their hoary and venerable heads, the golden haloes succeed each other in vistas of gleaming horseshoes or, when a saintly host is assembled in close array, in a shining interlock of glory like the overlapping scales of a vast goldfish. Barely sheltered from snow and rain by a loggia on the outer walls of remote fanes, the weatherworn lineaments of the pagan sages of the Greek world can be discerned: Solon, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Thucydides, Sophocles and Apollonius of Tyana,[2] arrayed in robes as honourable as those that adorn the Christian saints, but bereft of haloes. Their presence, due to passages in their writings interpreted as prophecy or ratification of the incarnation of Christ, seems to announce the age-old truth that the Greek Orthodox Church glorifies not only the Christian miracle as revealed to the Evangelists but the continuity and indestructibility of Hellenism and the part played in Christianity by the thought and discipline of the pagan Greek philosophers. Where but in the ancient schools (these figures imply), were developed the intellectual thews which enabled the great Doctors to hammer the raw material of the Gospels into the intricate and indestructible apparatus of Christian dogma? Without the dialectical and philosophic skill of these rain-swept sages, who would have heard of the Three Hierarchs indoors, so splendidly robed and haloed, polished by the kisses and dark with the incense of fifteen centuries: SS. John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa? Or of SS. Gregory Nazianzen or Athanasius? Or, for that matter, of the only great early doctor of the plodding and barbarous west, St. Augustine of Hippo?[3] Without our help (the honoured exiles seem to say) who would have unravelled the perplexing skein of the Trinity or confuted the subtle-tongued heresiarchs or championed the Homoousion and the Double Nature?
The Greeks do well to honour these ancient mentors. They enabled their descendants to save the Divine message from the mumblings of the catacombs and to sort out the Semitic data; in cell and archbishopric and council, they attuned their skilful minds to detect, interpret and codify the promptings of the Holy Ghost. The evolution of Christianity into a logical system which could weather the shocks of millennia, was a Greek thing. The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of classical Greek culture. For extent and influence in the world the dual message of Greek philosophy and the Greek interpretation of the Christian revelation stands alone.
Scenes of carnage often cover the walls of churches from vaulting to flagstone. Beheadings, flayings, burnings, roastings, boilings, rendings, crushings, breakings, impalings, mutilations, hecatombs, dismemberments by bent trees and by galloping horses redden the mural cartouches with blood and flame. But something serene and formal in the treatment of these orgies of martyrdom, a mild and benevolent composure in the faces of both executioner and victim and even on the haloed faces of the decapitated martyrs, robs their impact of anguish and horror. These emblematic ordeals have the punctilio of a dance commemorating early heroism in the cause of the faith. They do not demand that we should participate vicariously in their torments. In fact, so identically non-committal are the persecutors and their prey that, if any such advocacy were at work, the wicked, as the artisans of beatitude, seem to solicit our approval with an equal claim. The swords and pincers they wield are the keys of paradise. Passion is far removed and the figures are, in fact, not figures at all in the ordinary sense, but symbols. The same absence of the argumentum ad hominem is discernible in the iconographic approach to Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin, especially in the treatment of the Nativity and the Passion. There is never a blush or a simper, the infant Jesus is never a dimpled bambino. The Byzantine interpretation of the sufferings of Our Lord does not seek our participation in His physical torments or ask us, as do religious artists in the West, to undergo the Passion by proxy. The tears of the Mater Dolorosa and the Ecce Homo are almost absent.
Post-primitive religious painting in the West is based on horror, physical charm, infant-worship and easy weeping. This, with the modified exception of some Macedonian painting, is practically unknown in the East. The Virgin Mary, who is significantly known to Orthodoxy as the All-Holy One, has the austere aloofness of an oriental empress; she is calm, unreal, hieratic, wide- and dry-eyed. The Holy Child is abstract and unearthly and his glance is the wise one of an adult; and, with few exceptions, Christ Crucified, in spite of the emaciation which was the immutable token of holiness, has the same unworldliness. Eastern hagiography is no less bloodthirsty than the Western—indeed, until the Middle Ages, they were nearly the same—but the crucifix is a much rarer adjunct to Orthodox worship and the infliction of the stigmata on privileged saints is unknown.
Our Lord is usually represented enthroned in splendour, gravely and triumphantly presiding over mankind, His left hand raised, thumb and fourth finger touching in benediction, enjoining—what? Nothing so simple as good conduct for fear of Hell fire. The need perhaps of learning to penetrate symbols. The emphasis of the Christian year falls on the Easter victory: Christ risen from the dead, Christ as God and the All Powerful Christ Pantocrator, undemonstrative, impersonal and divine. He soars overhead in the centre of the dome in a golden sky as transcendent as the regions of abstract thought. Aloof and august, He floats in an atmosphere which is still and spellbound and if a presiding mood can be identified, it is one of faint, indefinable and glorious melancholy, like the thought of space. Ikons are wholly, like the paintings of Piero della Francesca in the pages of Mr. Berenson, unemphatic. All trace of apostrophe is lacking; there is no attempt to buttonhole the observer. Western Christs expose their wounds; Eastern Christs sit enthroned in ungesticulating splendour.
The Western medieval Madonna is a gentle and beautiful mediatrix, a celestial Philippa of Hainault, and we are the bur-ghers of Calais with ropes round our necks for whom she will intercede. When the Italian version of disinterred paganism had set new pulses beating, her statues, like Venus addressing a reluctant Adonis, seem almost to woo her devotees. At its worst there is the hint of an ogle, a veiled appeal for fans. In the West, iconographically, Our Lord and Our Lady and the Army of Saints, whether they are exquisite idealizations or smirking and blubbering simulacra, are, each of them, one of us. Their Eastern effigies—which, during all these mutations, scarcely changed in thirteen centuries—are emphatically different. The expression of the Panayia, even at the foot of the Cross, says “No Comment.” If an expression can be detected in the raised arcs of eyebrow and the wide eyes enigmatically gazing through the kisses and the incense and the candle flames, it is, most strangely, a faintly quizzical and ironical one. “Do not worship me,” perhaps, “but what I represent.”
The unexclamatory message of these paint and mosaic figures is neither sensual nor emotional. It is a spiritual and an intellectual one. They are not, in the ordinary sense, figures at all; they are symbols of the abstract idea of God which offer different facets of the Divine principle. If the right formulae existed, the message might have been conveyed by elaborate geometrical figures or intricately decorative algebraic equations. They are, in fact, ideograms. So slender is their link with flesh and blood, that it is almost an accident that the notation happens to be, in its very rarified way, anthropomorphic. They are, one might say, gilded and illuminated cube roots of the Logos.
There were plenty of ascetic solitaries in the early days of the Eastern Church: the Thebaid and all the Levant were scattered with them, stylites dreamed their lives away on the summit of columns, dendrites chained themselves to the topmost branches of high trees. Speluncar Christianity throve and hermits meditated in many a cave. The mysticism of East and West may be said to have sprung from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (and thus from Proclus), but the interpretation was very different. The macerations, austerities, meditations and penances of these lonely figures are closer to the general mystic temper of the Orient than they are to the mystics of the West. They were part of a Christianized tributary of the general Asiatic stream of mysticism that branched out at different times into the Kabeiri and the initiate religions of Pagan Greece, the Gnostics, the Neoplatonists, the Essenes, Yogis, Sufis and the various Dervish sects. They immersed themselves in the abstraction of divine omnipresence and I feel that a Byzantine mystic would have been closer in spirit to the meditations of Jellaladin on the astrolabe of God’s mysteries—he, indeed, inherited much from Greek thought—than to the ecstasies of, say, Marie de l’Incarnation or Saint Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross. In the latter case, again, the approach was personal and immediate, involving not only metaphysics but the passions: a private or reciprocal relationship between the Divinity and one human being; and, parallel in this to the iconography of the West, the terminology is startlingly anthropomorphic and literal. The solitary quest for union with God is expressed, for lack of a fitting vocabulary, in the specific language of love. Hesychasm, the Strange Quietism of late Byzantium which flourished in the monasteries of Athos, was the last mystical movement of Greek Orthodoxy. That discipline of slow breathing, attuned to the endless lamaic repetition of a single prayer, the silent posture and the searching gaze irremovably focused on the navel until, in a trance, the inner light of Mount Tabor should begin to glow there—this is more in harmony with the East than with the West. Fiercer enemies than the hostile Greek monks of Calabria lay in wait for such strange twilight flowerings of Byzantine mysticism.... The crescent hoisted on the dome of Justinian in Constantinople changed and circumscribed the rôle of the Greek Church for ever. The stem that put forth such extravagant blooms soon withered away. The cloud of Orthodox mystical feeling drifted to Russia; in that snowy world, its fusion with the Slav temperament threw off many curious spiritual phenomena, not least of them Dostoievsky. The Philokalia, the beautiful and simple meditations of the hesychasts, was, until the Revolution, far more widely read in Russia than it is in Greece to-day.
Byzantium fell, and the tears on ikons of the All-Holy One were not, to the awestruck Romaic world, the tears of the Mater Dolorosa for her Son, but the tears of a celestial Empress (and, beyond question, a Greek one) bewailing the death of the last terrestrial Emperor of the Greeks and the desecration by infidels of Orthodoxy’s central shrine. They were shed for the dispersal of her clergy and the falling silent of her bells and gongs; for the sprouting of minarets and the insult of the first muezzin’s call. The Pantocrator retreated more inaccessibly into his golden zenith.
Perhaps it would have been better for Orthodoxy in the end, whatever the aesthetic loss, if the symbolism of religious painting and the arcane splendour of the liturgy had been less lofty and abstruse. For the clergy’s task, in the ensuing Dark Ages (whose beginning exactly coincided with the Renaissance in the West and only ended in the Industrial Revolution), was the actual physical survival of their flock: its spiritual welfare was left to bare forms of sacrament and liturgy. Scholarship died. Spiritual development fossilized. Falling static at the time of the catastrophe, Orthodoxy became the most conservative of religions. All but rudimentary teaching vanished. But the forms became more august and venerable, more apt an emblem of lost glory and more hermetic a token of national continuity the further they floated from everyday understanding. In this new function the Church grew in power and became steadily more beloved and revered; the less religion functioned as a vehicle of the Christian ethic, the more holy it grew as the sole guarantee of survival. “Christian” and “Orthodox” became negative words and lost their meaning as moral or doctrinal terms; the former came to signify little more than non-Moslem, the latter—with “Romios” the paradoxical antonym of “Latin,” the epithet of the hated Catholics of the West who, with the Crusades, were the first to destroy the Orthodox Empire and make straight the way for Islam—meant, precisely, Greek.
Long gone were the days when the subtle Eastern theologians could with difficulty make the blunt Western prelates grasp the delicate shades of dogma; indeed the shoe was on the other foot. But the outward observances, the liturgy, some of the sacraments, prostrations, rigorous fasts, frequent signs of the cross, the great feasts of the Church—the cross thrown into the sea at Epiphany, the green branches of Palm Sunday, the candles and coloured eggs celebrating the risen Christ at Easter, the monthly censing of houses, and the devotion to ikons before which an oil-dip twinkles in every house—all this became rigid and talismanic: and so it has remained. Its scope is different from what is usually conjured up in the West by the word “Christianity”; but there is a tendency in the most peaceful nations to identify religion with the tribe and the reasons in Greece are more cogent than most. All the outward and visible signs are there and it would be a bold critic who would unburden them completely of inward and spiritual grace. There is nothing laggard or perfunctory about these signs; they are performed with reverence and love. They have the familiarity and the treasured intimacy of family passwords and countersigns. The day is punctuated by these fleeting mementoes, and pious landmarks in the calendar, usually solemnized with dance and rejoicing, space out the year; with the result that few gestures are wholly secular. They weave a continuous thread of the spiritual and supernatural through the quotidian homespun and ennoble the whole of life with a hieratic dignity. There is a deep substratum of virtue and innocence in the Greek character which is very distinct, and much more positive a thing than the universal truism of peasant simplicity—compared to this general norm they are old in guile and sophistication. It is a trait which has weathered barbarian influx and foreign dominion. It may be a survival of ancient Greek areté and love of excellence, the survival of Christian teaching in the past or a by-product of the ecological influences of the Greek sea and mountains and light. The sky here exorcizes and abolishes the principle of intrinsic wickedness. Perhaps it is a triune conjunction of all three. The chief of the cardinal virtues, charity (when it is not obscured by the hot fumes of individual, family, party or national feud-spirit), they possess in an overwhelming degree.
The very Greekness of the liturgy bolsters up the warm tribal feeling. The fact that the Greek of the Epistles and Gospels is in Alexandrian koiné of the first century, and the main fabric of the Mass in the elaborate Byzantine language of St. John the Golden-Mouthed and none of it later than the seventh—all this flings the Greek mind back, once more, to past ages of incredible splendour and venerability. The language, largely incomprehensible to the unlettered faithful, sets it at a remove and doubles its wonder and numinosity and talismanic power. (Perhaps the word mysterion, the Greek for “sacrament,” as well as “mystery,” and the Last Supper being called “the Mystic Feast,” deepens this feeling.) This abstruseness is a source of pride and proprietorship different in its nature to the Latin of the Roman rite. The saintly idiom, though it has floated up beyond their grasp, is their own, the language, as it were, that their great-grandfathers spoke in happier days. It is a family affair and Our Lord and Our Lady and their enormous saintly retinue have long since become honorary fellow-countrymen. Although they never follow the liturgy in a parallel text, the congregation know some of the basic prayers and anthems since childhood and the identity of many scattered fragments in these two phases of Greek—the liturgical and the spoken—conveys an inkling of what is afoot. They lean back in their stalls and the long hours of chanting evolve round them in a magnificent and half-penetrable cloud of sound, an interweaving of canon and invocation and antiphon, of troparia and kondakia, of the canticle of the Cherubim, the Symbol of Nicaea, the litanies of the Faithful and of the Catachumens, perhaps the hymn of the Akathistos, of Cassia or the Myrrh-bringers, the constant renewal of the doxology and the multiple iteration of the Kyrie Eleison; all intoned or chanted, strangely syncopated in the minor mode of oriental plainsong, in a ritual tangle of hovering neums and quarter-tones.[4]
There is no feeling of tension in the Orthodox service, no climax of awed silence at the moment of miracle, followed by an unwinding. In spite of its name, and whatever its intent, it is unmystic in atmosphere. But it is dramatic. It is a gleaming and leisurely—almost a sauntering—pageant. Much of the drama unfolds behind the iconostasis, that roodscreen dividing the nave from the chancel; priests and deacons, their beards flowing and their long hair uncoiled over coruscating vestments, make processional entrances and exits, swinging thuribles bearing candles or a metal bound gospel, through the outside two of the three doors in this screen; doors which some scholars derive from the three thresholds in the proscenium of ancient Greek tragedy. The central door was reserved, they say, for the protagonist at the play’s climax; and, indeed, the celebrant only emerges from it to-day when he proffers the sacred vessels after the elevation. There is no excessive simulacrum of piety in the deportment of the officiating clergy. Their heads are flung back and the eyes above their singing mouths are cast up into the air in a mild unfocused gaze. Something tired, patrician and relaxed informs their gait and the deacons with their sweeping dalmatics and wide stoles, their youthful beards, their long dark hair and the lustrous wide eyes that illuminate their wax-pale faces, have the air of Byzantine princes who in martyrdom might turn into St. Stephen or St. Sebastian. The older clergy resemble minor prophets. The great dignitaries, who are always adorned with vast spreading beards and usually very tall (the thought has sometimes crossed my mind that Orthodox preferment may be a matter of height), glitter with golden copes and pectoral ornaments and snake-topped crosiers. With their white locks mitred with gem-studded globular crowns, they resemble pictures of God the Father. But, except at grave moments, an easy-going, paternal benevolence often leavened by the glint and the wrinkles of humour, stamps the faces of these deities. Their faces hint at an antique knowledge of their own and mankind’s fallibility; they betoken tolerance of back-sliding and quickness to forgive. Their anathema is reserved for temporal targets.
The evolutions of all these figures against the effulgence of gilding and fresco and mosaic and brocade themselves form a kind of moving ikon, but familiarity and glory are so blended that the whole office suggests a leisurely morning in one of the remoter courtyards of Paradise. The chanting continues, candles glimmer before ikons encrusted with beaten silver, the iconostasis towers like a jungle of gold, topped with a cross guarded by two coiling dragons, incense drifts through the columns, and, if it is a great feast, the crushed basil scattered underfoot sends up its additional fragrance. Remote and benign divinities shine in the cupolas and the apse, and round the drum that upholds the Pantocrator’s dome a legion of angels open their wings in a ring. A bland, non-committal and avuncular troop of painted saints populate the walls and a quiet, reassuring and universal benevolence, dropping softly as dew, seems to descend on the congregation. The mind is lulled. It is a fitting and comforting and mildly supernatural occasion, a family reunion both in the literal and the Confucian sense. Very little—except perhaps something in the spiritual outlook of the faithful—has changed in the slow punctilio of word and gesture and music for thirteen hundred years. For the last five hundred, almost nothing. Both as a manifesto of Greek continuity and as an historical survival it is precious and unique.
* * *
I have taken ikon-painting as the epitome of the long stasis of the Orthodox Church; perhaps rather arbitrarily.[5] Even the moderately informed on such matters know that there were, indeed, different schools and even renaissances, in the history of Byzantine art, and very interesting they are. But in no case are these deviations from the essential canon as great as the gaps that yawn between great schools of the West, or as revolutionary as the Italian Renaissance. But I am only concerned here with one facet of this absorbing subject: the interaction of the Greek religion and Greek religious art.
The installation of the Turks in Constantinople and their occupation of all Greek lands was, to all but bare survival, a circular glare of the Medusa’s head. Luxuries like spiritual thought and painting were Gorgon-struck. The task of the clergy and of the ikon-painters was not progress or creation but sheer maintenance; things had to be kept intact until better days dawned. Religion and religious art, already contained by strict rules, became inflexible. The result was stagnation in religion, and in art, endless repetition and, at last, degeneration. Iconography remained intellectual, lofty and remote but learning dried up and with it the power to apprehend the abstruse messages implicit in Byzantine art. Unquestioning and uncomprehending formalism followed. The meaning of the equations behind cypher and symbol retreated and the almost algebraic notation itself become an object of cult. The overbred, long-fingered Byzantine hands were thickening on the plough.... Perhaps in this lean period a different and more accessible kind of ikon-painting, a lowering of the intellectual sights from head to heart, would have served their strictly religious purposes better.
Plenty of indications exist that during the late Middle Ages an opposite trend to Byzantine inflexibility was in being. It might have gained momentum if the Fall of the Empire had not condemned it to stillbirth. It might have changed the whole nature of Byzantine art. I refer to the “pathetic,” to a loosening of the stern rules of iconography, an accompaniment of the austere and cerebral idiom by an address to the emotions. The most important of these symptoms appear in the renaissance that followed the recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks after the sixty-odd years of the Latin Empire that followed the Fourth Crusade. The impulse had sprung up in the hardy exiled empire of the Lascarids at Nicaea. In Constantinople it flowered under the beginnings of the last dynasty, the Palaeologues, in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, and appeared at its best on the mosaics of the Church of St. Saviour in Chora,[6] not far from the Theodosian walls. These mosaics were placed there, along with his own portrait, by Andronicus II Palaeologue’s Great Logothete, Theodore Metochites, who, on the strength of his extraordinary headdress, has already appeared in these pages.[7] In the scenes from the Life of the Virgin there is an appealing gentleness, a fluidity of motion and an unbending from the austere regulation postures that is full of tenderness and human warmth and pity. The mosaic persons are still traditionally moonfaced, but a pulse begins tentatively to beat, the symbol and content merge.... Some have proposed, and others have fairly convincingly scouted, the hypothesis that this iconographic trend is an Eastern reflection of the Italian trecento brought about by a West to East cultural traffic incidental to the Crusades. It seems clear, however, that the tendency was autochthonously generated, a spontaneous upsurge of new vitality in Byzantium’s ancient frame. This Indian summer was soon to be extinguished.
In fact, the tide of influence flowed all the other way, in a steady movement which began long before the earliest glimmer of the Italian Renaissance. The Byzantine share in Italian primitive art needs no underlining. It was not, as former authorities were wont to assume, a mass swoop westwards, as from a Pandora’s box suddenly prised open, of all the treasures of the Greek world at the Fall, which a happy coincidence of dates seemed once to suggest. There is little in the Byzantine Middle Ages to indicate a reciprocal Frankish influence, certainly nothing comparable to that of Byzantium on, say, St. Mark’s in Venice. It is surprising, on the other hand, how little the Western plastic techniques of the Crusaders were influenced locally in their fiefs of the Greek world and Outremer. The Gothic churches of Cyprus and the omnipresent castellated ruins remain as alien to their setting as the Anglican Cathedral in Calcutta and British cantonments in Rawalpindi and Hong Kong, or, for that matter, in Nicosia. There was, however, a slight trickle of influence from West to East. In literature this took the shape of a few charming and artificial verse romances, an Eastern echo of chivalric prototypes that is very insipid compared to the vigour of the true Byzantine heroic vernacular in the great saga of Digenis Akritas. Perhaps a more interesting contribution may be observed in the Western exonarthex of Daphni, if, that is, the frescoes there are not contemporary with those of the rest of the church, but two centuries after and later than the Crusades, as Dr. Angelos Procopiou, to the consternation of many, has recently suggested. Here the same “pathetic” trends, comparable to those of the Chora, can be observed. Mr. Procopiou’s proposition has not yet been either ratified or destroyed by outside authoritative opinion, but his case is most seductively argued. The Western influences that he detects are those of the Siennese school and particularly of Duccio di Buoninsegua; and this hypothetical merging of the two trends he attributes to the tolerant attitude of the Frankish dukes of Athens, of the De La Roche family.[8] Intermarried with Greek princesses, both Catholic and Orthodox clergy frequented their Court in a brief ecclesiastical truce and this harmony may have loosened the iconographic barriers for Western infiltration. It is an inviting thought.
The remoteness, the formality and the austerity of Byzantine ikon-painting was originally a result of the mass destruction of religious portraiture started by the iconoclast emperor, Leo the Isaurian, in 727. It was a puritan, anti-monastic reaction that grew up in the minds of Asian Greeks largely because of the horror in which Islam and Jewry held all reproductions of the human as well as the divine countenance. Ikons were finally restored and the dissolved monasteries re-monked by the Empress Theodora in 842. This upheaval brought about a purifying and spiritualizing change in iconography. Hellenistic materialism, which had co-existed, in a meaty and ever-slackening dotage, with the fresh and vivid splendour of early Byzantine mosaics, was dead for ever. The realistic third dimension of sculpture flattened into the more intangible medium of painter and mosaicist. The holy dramatis personae, almost disembodied now, sailed into a spiritual and rarified empyrean of mystery and awe from which the centuries have not dislodged them.
From this moment it can be said that religious art in the East sought to bring man to God’s level, and in the West, bring God to man’s; each laying stress on a different half of Our Lord’s nature. It is a significant difference of plastic emphasis. Persian and Arabian graces in the detail of decoration—fountains, peacocks, flowers and intricate designs from oriental fabrics—tempered the splendid austerity of mosaic and fresco and illuminated parchment; but, more important, the continued study of the ancient Greeks propelled a harmonious and unbroken underground river of Platonic thought, sluggish at times, at others leaping forth in cascades and spreading in great serene lakes which irrigated and complemented the Christian dogma it had done so much to form; incidentally affecting at times, out of archaizing allegiance, the iconographic décor; but, more importantly, carrying the figures themselves yet further into transcendence and incorporeality. If Justinian had hoped to halt the speculative thought of the pre-Christian world by closing the philosophical schools in Athens, he closed them in vain. Psellus the Hellenist, during one of these recurring revivals, indicated the spiritual mood when he spoke of “stealing from intelligence the incorporeal quality of things and realizing the light within the body of the Sun.” The ambience is silent and still and stratospheric in its distance from everyday human passions.
The renaissance that followed the Fourth Crusade, of which I spoke a few pages back, was a reaction from this supernal exaltation. Hard times had come, most of the Empire was divided among infidels and the alien and reciprocally schismatic Franks. The walls now girded a pillaged and half-ruined city full of weeds and rubble and waste land and cornfields...the Roman Empire, founded thirteen centuries earlier, had just one and a half more to go. The changed temper—a compound of vigour and melancholy—which had prompted the mosaics of St. Saviour in Chora took general form in the iconography of the Macedonian school. It was a feeling that spread in widening rings all over Greek lands and into the southern marches of the Slav world from the peak of Mount Athos. The move towards purely mortal distress was epitomized by a fixation on the human sorrows of Our Lord and the Panayia. This modification of religious paintings, so glaringly at variance with all that had gone before, had, however, long been latent in the Greek world in Asia. The sorrowful aspect of Christianity, the Passion and the Sufferings of the Virgin, all that which was to run riot in the Western Church, had been simmering in the East since divines like George of Nicodemia in the ninth century had enlarged on the Passion of the Virgin, which, five centuries later, St. Bernard was to spread across the whole of Western Christendom.
Far from the religious radiance of the Metropolis a gloomier, wilder, tougher, more uncouth form of picture had covered the tufa walls of the Cappadocian rock monasteries—anyone who has seen that harsh light and those desolate and fierce volcanic cones in which they are warrened can understand this well.[9] There must have been something in the air propitious to their emergence now. These new trends, meeting the old on Athonite monastery walls, produced the beautiful Macedonian school. Painting gained in fluidity and human feeling—in the pathetic, indeed—but lost much of the inner luminosity which is the great glory of Byzantine art.[10] It must be made quite clear, however, that it never sinks (though perhaps it meant to) to the dolorous realism that later swamped the West. The divine Protagonist and the Blessed Virgin, even when she is fainting at the Cross’s foot, have the hieratic dignity of figures from Greek tragedy; and the ritual character of an ancient chorus pervades the bowed heads of mourning women. There is no element here that presaged the stagey rictus and pictorial syncope, the dark wayside fetishism of Italy and Spain or the amazing northern excruciations of Grünewald; no hint of the religious trend which rears the black silhouette of Golgotha and the panoply of the lance, reed, sponge, whip, hammer, nails, pincers and thorns between the eye of mankind and the splendour of God.
* * *
Suddenly, on the steep and rocky flank of a detached cone of the Taygetus, seventy miles north of the point on the Mani coast where these last rambling pages began and five miles from the first page of the book, on the very eve of the Empire’s collapse, all the luminosity, all the splendour and radiance of Eastern art suddenly emerged with a changed and newborn vigour that seems, to-day, a challenging salute of the condemned. Houdini-like, the painting of Mistra had elbowed itself loose alike from the hindering bonds of the ancient iconological formulae and from Macedonian hypochondria. Retaining all that was most precious in both, it put forth new and bold juxtapositions and interlocks of colour and, as though by magic, humanized gods, angels, saints and mortals without draining them of a flicker of their spirituality. They not only exalt the beholder, which is an almost unfailing attribute of Byzantine painting; they touch and move him as well. It is a miracle of delicate balance, and it is almost a solution to the question these pages have been asking. How long could it have continued? It is exactly contemporary with the trecento and early quattrocento in Tuscany and Umbria which, all too soon, without the disaster of alien conquest, were to be water-logged by Latin materialism. Perhaps it was too frail and rare a thing to endure. Certainly its setting and its incubation were unique; for all these Mistra frescoes were painted within a few decades of the Empire’s fall. The town was to survive the Capital by three strange years. With the exception of the minute far-away Empire of Trebizond, which went out sadly and ingloriously after yet another couple of years, it was the last lonely star of the great constellation of Greece. Only the south-east corner of the Peloponnese—the triangle contained by the fortresses of Mistra and Monemvasia and the Mani—comprised this isolated Byzantine despotate. A few miles away, at the wreck of old Sparta, Frankish feudalism began; and further north, as the time grew short, the armies of Amurath and Bajazet the Thunderbolt, pigtailed and shaven-pated under their pumpkin turbans, were ravaging and subjugating Greece. Brass-crescented horsetail banners, the baleful green flags and the kettledrums and all the martial and barbarous clangour of the Mongolian steppes were just out of sight and earshot. From the great crenellated palaces of the Palaeologues and the Cantacuzenes, dominating the belfries and the cypresses and the bubbling domes and cupolas of the steep honeycomb town, fluttered as though they would flutter for ever, the silken banners charged with the linked B’s of Byzantium and the two-headed Imperial eagle.
In this airy casket of a city, surrounded by the elaborate and fastidious array of an imperial household and a court of nobles and prelates and aulic dignitaries and men of letters, a succession of purple-born princes reigned: strange and stately figures in their fur-trimmed robes and melon-crowned caps-of-maintenance. The libraries filled with books, poets measured out their stanzas, and on the scaffolding of one newly-risen church after another painters mixed their gypsum and cinnabar and egg-yolk and powdered crocus and zinc and plotted the fall of drapery and described the circumference of haloes. It was the last age of Byzantine mysticism, and, most important of all, Mistra, right up to its eclipse, was the seat of the last Greek Neoplatonist revival, presided over by the Great Gemistus Plethon, one of the most redoubtable scholars of Europe. He it was who argued the niceties of dogma with the Western Car-dinals at the Council of Florence; and, long after Mistra had died, Sigismondo Malatesta, to add the lustre of scholarship to his usurped principality, translated his bones to a splendid sarcophagus on the walls of his temple at Rimini. In courtyards murmurous with philosophic argument and debate and syllogism, Gemistus contrived the same Platonist system and semi-pagan cosmogony that he presided over at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Far from the twilit, miasmal, gong-tormented Bosphorus and the vapours of the Golden Horn, this was the world, rock-perched in the heart of the crystalline air above the loops of the Eurotas and the olive woods of Lacedaemon, which fostered the genesis of these paintings. Mistra is an extinct star now; but, embedded in that upheaval of mineral,—battered and cracked and weather-fretted on the walls of the churches of the Periblepton, the Metropolis, the Brontochion and the Pantanassa,—one can see a miraculous surviving glow of the radiance that gave life to this last comet as it shot glittering and sinking across the sunset sky of Byzantium.
* * *
Almost anything, in the boundaries and possibilities of Byzantine art, would be a step back after this. Cretan painting is more a step aside than a regression. Those bonds of tradition which Mistra had shaken loose are there, but they have changed; where they induced a droop in the Macedonian school, they are worn in the Cretan with a swagger. The muscular and etiolated faces assume an unearthly frown of defiance, sometimes a scowl; and in their robes the flow of multiple folds and pleats in contrasting colours, as though of shot material—one of the great features of all Eastern painting—take on something more violent; they become taut radiations of expanding zigzags from the bent elbow or knee which has confined them. Goat-skin becomes shaggier, caves in the mountain-side look as though torn open with a blade and the jutting Sinais and the stepped and toppling crags, sundered by ravines with all the fierceness of the actual Cretan ranges, are in a state of faction: they are an insurrection of colossal geometric ghosts. As in the island itself, dramatic tension is stretched between those soaring commotions of rock—golden or peach-coloured, or vitreous or ice blue or hard as steel or ashen and aghast—on taut invisible threads. The figures, like the Cretans themselves, are illuminated and intensely masculine, a manic-depressive compound of brooding melancholy and exaltation; and the inner light, which the Macedonians lost in a measure, shoots from the sinister shadows undimmed. But in spite of their energy, there is nothing uncouth or brutal in these painted saints as there was among the Cappadocians; and, for all their vigour, they are instinct with Byzantine introversion. They are far removed from materialism, and the tension, the violence and the tragedy are all in the world of spirits. The detail is subtle and delicate: the cartographic wrinkles and circling contour-lines on the saints’ faces, the line of nose and nostril, the sweep of those hoary eyebrows over each of which beetles an outlined irascible and thought-indicating bulge; the dark and, by contrast, etiolating triangles that project point downwards from the lower lids, the bristling curl of the white locks round foreheads that catch the light like polished teak, the prescribed complexity of their beards cataracting in effulgent arcs or erupting like silver quills from swarthy physiognomies—all of this, on close inspection, proves to be built up of complementary planes of brick red and apple green applied with delicate impressionism to the black phantom of the saint or paladin beneath. The emergence of this dark background under a luminous and fragmentary carapace of skilfully superimposed light and colour (a technique explained in precise detail by Dionysios of Phourna for those wishing to paint Krétika) is the earmark of the Cretan mode. I am tempted to relate this very strange technique, especially in ikons of Our Lord, with reasons that are not purely plastic. It calls irresistibly to mind a characteristic passage of St. Dionysios the Areopagite: “The Divine Dark,” writes this other Dionysios, “is the inaccessible Light in which God is said to dwell, and in this Dark, invisible because of its surpassing radiance and unapproachable because of the excess of the streams of supernatural light, everyone must enter who is deemed worthy to see or know God.”[11]
The Cretan school is like a wonderful reprieve after the final catastrophe, for, owing to its mountainous inaccessibility and the division of spoils at the Fourth Crusade, which allotted it to the Venetians—or rather to Boniface of Monferrat, who sold it to the Doge at once—Crete was Venetian still. It became a place of refuge for the Greek world, a centre of Hellenism and a workshop of literary and artistic energy. We have seen[12] that the Cretans had established strong roots in Venice; in Crete itself they more than held their own, large quantities of Venetian families settled in Crete and many of their great names are now scattered among the villages and sheepfolds. This strange gunshot marriage of lagoon and crag seems to have continued (at any rate on the intellectual level), with the inevitable insurrections, in a protracted honeymoon. The island was graced with a positive pleiad of painters, poets and playwrights. Cultures interwove and the educated Greeks and the long-established Venetians were largely bilingual. It is thus remarkable how little Venetian influence can be detected when the Cretan school first came into prominence, just as it is remarkable that there are scarcely a dozen Italian words in the ten thousand lines of the great Cretan epic poem, the Erotokritos (1604), in spite of the author’s name, which was Vincentios Cornaros. Towards the end Venetian influences crept in and, decadence though it may be, even though the peculiar Byzantine radiation grew tamer in the conventions of chiaroscuro, there is something both captivating and splendid about the flame reds and the hints of Titian and Veronese in the folds of satin and velvet and the red-gold glint of the scaly breastplates of warrior-saints.
After the island fell in 1669, the movement succumbed to the usual Ottoman blight; little remained, and, dispersed abroad, it died in the eighteenth century. But it was during its virile zenith in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that it affected Greece. Its finest monument in fresco—one of the few that remain—is in Mount Athos. Others survive, half-way to the sky, in the Meteora[13] in Thessaly. But Cretan ikons, glowing on slabs of olive, walnut, hard pine, poplar and plane, travelled all over the archipelago and the mainland and to Venice, where dark Cretan madonnas had long adorned palazzi; and to Russia. Alongside the Macedonian school, and often painted by non-Cretan hands, the Cretan technique was the strongest strain in the iconography of occupied Greece. These fierce saints and holy heroes and haggard Christs and Panayias formed a kind of pictorial resistance movement against apathy. It is lucky such a definite and vigorous style was there to fend off the inevitable catalepsy. One by one the sources of inspiration—Asia Minor, Cyprus, the Mainland, Constantinople, Mistra, Trebizond, the Archipelago and finally Crete—had been trampled out. When at last the stagnation of endless reproduction set in, their function became indeed that of Celestial guerrillas; at war not with a theological foe but against the occupying stranger.
There is another development or deviation which is of great sociological and historical interest, but of little relevance to the present theme: the Italianization of painting in the Ionian islands. For this western archipelago remained in Venetian hands from the crusades until the French Revolution (when after a short French interregnum, they were British for half a century) and though the inhabitants remained staunchly Orthodox—indeed, some noble families of Italian origin, and thus Catholic, like the Capodistrias of Corfu and the Romas of Zante, ended up themselves as Orthodox—the influence of Venice and the Italian studios and universities, especially Padua, was strong. To such an extent was Italian the cultural language of the bilingual élite that the Zantiot poet Ugo Foscolo wrote exclusively in Italian; so it was too, until he was well on in years, with one of Greece’s greatest modern poets, his fellow-islander, Solomos.
The Ionian islands were the only part of the Greek family which entirely escaped the dead hand of the Turks. Cut off for six centuries by only a few miles of sea from the tragic doings of the mainland, they were part of Europe. Crescents and minarets rose on the Epirote shore, while, across the narrow channel, the Ionians, in Elizabethan ruffs, then powdered wigs and finally stove-pipe hats and cutaways, participated in a quiet and provincial fashion in the Renaissance and the ripening afternoon of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the early Romantic movement of the nineteenth. It is a proof of the vitality of Hellenism that the comparative mildness of the Doge’s suzerainty and the absence of the mainland’s ruthless challenge should have left their intrinsic Greekness so unimpaired. Without the age-old identification of Greek with Orthodoxy, perhaps they would have become Uniates at least, like the Orthodox of the Ukraine or the Banat and, finally, the Maniots of Cargese. But they often took part in hostilities against the Turks (notably at Lepanto), under the Lion of St. Mark; and after the fall of Candia, Cretans flocked as thickly into the Ionian as they did into the Mani; and the islands were for centuries a refuge for the klephts and armatoles of the mainland. Despite the Venetian fleshpots, their sympathy and their participation in the struggle of their fellow-countrymen was entire. The first head of the resurrected Greek State—Count Capodistria—was an Ionian and the Seven Islands became a great national hearth of Greek poetry. There might have been advantages to the Ionians later on, in remaining part of the British Empire; but towards the end of our occupation the ideological outcry for reunion to the Greek State became loud and determined. Wisely, and with lasting benefit to all, Enosis was conceded.
In spite of the unwavering Hellenism of the Seven Islands, Venice inevitably left strong superficial traces culturally, socially, architecturally, and to a very slight extent, linguistically, but most considerably in the arts. It certainly influenced ikon-painting. The first detectable symptoms of deviation from the Byzantine canon is a mild softening-up that might be traced to Tiepolo. This trend was hit by Cretan influence from two sides: from Venice, where it was already established, and from Crete itself before, and especially after, the Fall. The results of this are lively and original. But slowly, with passing of time, the figures echoed in their provincial and less deft way, the metropolitan prototypes of Venice and the rest of Italy; and many of the ikons among the gilt and brass of baroque and rococo iconostases became oval or circular, which is very rare in the rest of Orthodoxy. The treatment of sacred subjects drifted further and further from the abstraction of Byzantium until the ambience is the tired, diffused and muted light of a minor Italian studio when the Counter-Reformation had spent itself. The umbered faces are all too human and unillumined and unenigmatic in their verisimilitude of smooth cheek and appealing eye and droop of lip and fold of mantle. The supernal light is filtered through the dishcloth of chiaroscuro, the cosmetics of morbidezza are busy. I demanded, some pages back, a more comprehensible notation: I am killed with kindness here; for, in these ikons, the purpose of the concession is lost. This elegant subsidence to earth is not what I was after, which was some kind of iconographic change to enable the ethical and moral part of religion to keep pace with the tribal and magical part until the expulsion of the Turks. But this late Ionian painting is part of the general western European deflation in religious art, a slow draining away of the supernatural from pigment and stone and clay. Some of them—framed in a leafy swirl of ba-roque gilding—are very fine indeed: but they are no longer,—except geographically—Greek.[14] They are part of the painting of the West, and, as such, worthy of a much more dignified place in any conspectus of European art than they have yet received, except in an admirable study by Procopiou. But they have defected completely from the line we have been following and have no relevance to it. They have, of course, apart from their merits, the great charm of historical oddity. The beautiful eighteenth-century ikon—if it can be called that; it is closer to an enlarged predella—of the Procession of St. Dionysius in the Cathedral of Zante (happily saved from the 1953 earthquake; I saw it next day in the burning wreckage of that lovely vanished town), in which the saint’s catafalque is escorted by a crocodile of tricorned nobili huomini, might be the work of a remote septinsular cousin of Longhi or Guardi. We have floated a long, long way from St. Sophia and Ravenna and the old basilicas of Rome and Holy Luke and Torcello and Athos and Daphni and Salonika and Palermo and Cefalu and Monreale and the Chora and SS. Sergius and Bacchus and Nea Moni in Chios and Kastoria and Nerezi and Mistra and the Meteora and the Cappadocian rock monasteries; and almost as far from the ikon-painting in progress in the klepht-haunted and bullet-echoing crags of Acroceraunia and Epirus and Acarnania just over the water....
* * *
The inscrutability of ikons has done nothing to choke off devotion; indeed, the oldest and most indistinct invite the steadiest fervour of rural iconodules. This is especially true if they have thaumaturgic acts to their credit—feats of healing, the repulsion of barbarians and infidels from a city wall or timely intervention in battle, like the vision of Pan at Marathon, or of the Gemini at Lake Regillus. Some of them have miraculous origins: they were dropped from heaven or dug out of the earth after their location had been revealed in a dream. Our Lady of Tinos, who is responsible for many miraculous cures at her yearly feast, had such a beginning: she was exhumed on the very day that the standard of revolt against the Turks was raised in 1821, which surrounds her island with a patriotic as well as religious and thaumaturgic aura. Several ikons have specific healing properties, a function they share with certain holy remains, like those of St. Gerasimos on the slopes of Mt. Ainos in Cephalonia, whose reliquary, borne yearly over the prone ranks of ailing pilgrims, cures madness. Ikons have been known to fly many homing miles through the air to resettle in the chapels whence profane hands have reft them. There is a category known as acheiropoietoi—“not made with hands.” One of these, Our Lady of Edessa (where iconoclast troops were later to stone a wonder-working Christ), led the Emperor Heraclius all the way to Ctesiphon to rescue the True Cross from Chosroes in the battle which is immortalized on the walls of Arezzo.
Attributions to the brush of St. Luke are much less fre-quent than in Italy. There are only three, I think, which, in the Orthodox world, are incontradictably held to be the apostle’s work. I have seen two of these Lukes, one in the monastery of Megaspelion which juts from the high rock face of an Achaean gorge, the other in the monastery of Kykko in western Cyprus. It was difficult to discern more, in either case, than the uneven convexities of what appeared to be black wax jutting from a buckled and almost all-obscuring plastron of silvergilt. The third is our Lady of Soumela, an ancient lodestar for oriental pilgrimage in the huge monastery towering above the valley of the Of, inland from Trebizond.[15] When the Greeks (who had lived there without interruption almost since the occasion when Xenophon’s army espied the sea from a neighbouring height) were uprooted at the exchange of populations in 1922, she came too; and after four decades of obscurity in Athens, she was re-enshrined with great state in a part of western Macedonia where a population of her former Laz-speaking votaries had been resettled.
Black holy objects, in the world at large, seem to invite special veneration; I think of these ikons, and of the vanished smoke-blackened Virgin, from which the old Byzantine Church of the Kapnikarea in Athens derives its name; and of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, the Black Christ of Lucca and a small dark Virgin among the canefields near the pitch-lake in Trinidad, all of them heavy with mana.
The obverse of this addiction to black images seems to be popular indifference to white ones, whether of alabaster or marble. Perhaps their very clarity and scrutability is antiseptic to the germ of magic. They are un-mythopoetic, and the most beautiful in the Christian world, those of Michelangelo, must be content with the praise of the educated. Is this because their very perfection, and the lack of mystery surrounding their origin, over-humanizes them? At all events, piety and superstition seek darker loves. Perhaps the gods of ancient Greece, had they been snow-white as we see them in museums, would have suffered a like fate. But they were coloured all over, and their vo-taries were innumerable. It is easy to forget that the Parthenon and Delphi and Olympia were painted ox-blood and deep blue and ochre, and that the hosts of polychrome, black-eyed and staring statuary bristled with gold ornaments. The insides of the temples were obscure and mysterious and black smoke darkened the giant chryselephantine statues. They were curtained in purple and dripping with honey and wine and glistening with oil and blood, while the reek of carrion and burning meat filled the batlike gloom. Not only the gods of Olympus but the sinister chthonian demons haunted those precincts. I feel, too, that the archaic statues, because they were a further remove from the real, must have been magnets for a more fervid cult than their classical offspring.
It is perhaps odd that none of the great religious paintings of the Renaissance, none of the swirling baroque statues of the Counter-Reformation, with their welter of stone clouds and sunbursts, their crocodile tears and their brassy clamour, became cult objects on the same footing as their uncouth predecessors. Overstatement defeats them. Perhaps, after all, anthropomorphosis is a deterrent. There is, of course, an exception at the other end of Europe that represents a whole class of saints in facsimile: the amazing Virgen de la Macarena in Seville, borne out shaking among fanfares above the vast crowd from her church at midnight on a camelia-covered float sprouting into hundreds of candles under a canopy: a sad, pale and beautiful infanta of painted wood, with rings on her upheld fingers, a green and cloth of gold cloak sweeping six yards behind, a vast diadem on her head and an aureole of radiating gold spikes and the fortunes of half a dozen grandees round her neck in pearls and diamonds. Gasps and cries fill the air at her emergence and an outbreak of cheers and clapping, while the stifling swarm, like an English crowd at a glimpse of royalty or a film star, thrust yet tighter and climb on each other’s backs with cries of “¡O la guapa! ¡La linda! ¡la hermosa!”
Greek iconography, of all Christian art that includes the outward forms of sacred beings, seems to me to have set itself the highest and most difficult task. This does not mean, I hasten to say, that I am trying to compare the Michelangelo frescoes of the Vatican unfavourably with the worst eighteenth-century daub on a plank in a wayside chapel in Aetolia, or indeed (and only then with due allowance made for chronology) with any but the noblest in the achievement of the East. It is not a matter of technical skill or intrinsic beauty or the workings of plastic genius. What I do mean is this: in the foredoomed task of indicating the unfathomable mystery of Godhead in visible terms, the Greek ikon-painters chose the hardest way. They sought ingress to the spirit, not through the easy channels of passion, but through the intellect. Religion and philosophy were as inextricably plaited as they had been in pre-Christian times and this was due to the same philosophical temper which had saved Judaic Christianity (a brief and local thing) and made it Greek, then universal. Skilled in the handling of abstractions, knowing that the representation of Christ as God was as impossible a task as uttering the ineffable, they tried to indicate the immediately assimilable incarnation of Christ in such a way that it gave wings to the mind and the spirit and sent them soaring through and beyond the symbol to its essence, the Transcendent God, with whom, as they themselves had defined, He was consubstantial. If they failed in this aspiration it was failure on a vertiginously exalted height.
With wonderful exceptions in every case, the West, even in Romanesque and early medieval times, even in spite of the strange Eastern intimations in the trecento, especially during the Renaissance and above all and in spite of every opposite intention in the Counter-Reformation, the West has painted and sculpted Christ as man. The intellectual heights that beckoned the Byzantines remained unscaled and religion was propagated in art through the emotions. It is spiritually and theologically much less ambitious, but it is, quite obviously, more practical and reasonable; and in the long run it succeeded. It can drive one nearly insane to speculate what would have happened if the Crusaders had not scotched Byzantium and the Turks killed it; if, in fact, it had participated in or led the Renaissance, as even in its last throes it led and made possible the approach; instead of expiring at its outset. What course, for instance, would painting have taken, how would Mistra have been followed up? It is hopeless, because, without these events, one can play with the appalling thought that the Renaissance might never have happened. But, assuming for a moment a miraculous turning in the Empire’s fortunes when all that made the Renaissance was already under way and all the stimuli were working, one cannot but see a Golden Age of unmatched wonder: palaces and cathedrals out-soaring the already existing splendours of the most beautiful city in the world, the City which, before they looted and smashed it, struck the Crusaders dumb; one dreams of serene and exquisite cities springing up again round the Acropolis and at Salonika, Patras, Nauplia, Volo, Yanina, Larissa, Kavalla, Serres Komotini and Didymotikon; one guesses at the evolution of architecture, sculpture, poetry, thought and painting into new and unimaginable forms which would bear the same relationship to the Italian Renaissance that Greece bore to Rome....A wry smile must halt these thoughts.
It must indeed. This sudden shining mist of impossible surmise is one that floats again and again before the eyes both of Greeks and of strangers who look for more in these seas and islands and mountains than the dispersed and beautiful skeleton of the ancient world. It leaves a deposit, however, of hope and conviction (which I profoundly share and which are not weakened by their present Utopian air) that when the hindering contingencies at last disappear and Greek tribal obsessions, by the solution of their causes, lose their urgency and disencumber the dominating position in Greek thought which history has forced them to usurp; when the dogmatism of further East (against which almost all politicians and all the Church contend) loses its intermittent glow, and the materialism of the West (with which only Greek poets are at war)[16] loses its beguiling glitter and fades into proportion: when—I was about to say, when political harmony is achieved, but this is perhaps no more possible than it was in ancient Greece and Byzantium; when all this comes about, I think that the restless, dispersed and unharnessable but indestructible Greek genius, released at last, will produce something which will astonish and enrich the world again beyond all our imagination.
Let us brush this enticing mist from our eyes for the moment and focus them once more on the Greek pneumato-iconographic (if I may be allowed so hideous a word) hypothetical dilemma. When Greek religious art took shape it was an elaborate and beautiful cypher implicit with transcendental meaning for the most civilized race in the world, the only one outside the Far East that was accustomed to dealing in religious abstractions. Outside events drastically reduced these powers and redirected Greek energy, perforce, into the single grim channel of survival; and as the Dark Ages of Greece advanced deeper into darkness, the aloof and luminous faces of heaven, though they were no less cherished or venerated, became an allegory to which the key was lost. The practical West, which knew neither the exalted spiritual and intellectual heights of the East nor the obliterating ordeal which followed it, had, in their rational and materialist Roman way, been wiser: by appealing iconographically to a laity free of exaltation, through passion and fallibility and the easily apprehensible fellow-feelings of motherhood and pain; by, in fact, the pathetic. However alien the whole may seem to Northern and Judaistic Christianity, simple Latin formulae maintained a firm ideological grasp on the imagination by their very scrutability. They saved the religious pulse of countless simple millions from sclerosis and to a large measure kept religion free from confusion and extraneous principles. Would a modification of Eastern iconography, a simpler, an earthier and more “pathetic” medium, have had the paradoxical result of saving the spiritual content of Orthodox Christianity? Aesthetically the mind shies from the thought; but perhaps it would. Such outward modifications, quite consciously applied from above, have successfully redirected the character of religions; one thinks at once of the plastic changes that marked the end of the iconoclast disputes at Byzantium, of the Tridentine Decrees that generated the baroque imagery of the Counter-Reformation and of the total abolition that accompanied the Reformation in the North. What form this pragmatic alliance of Greek abstraction and Western naturalism could have taken is hard to determine; the frescoes of Mistra with their more accessible humanism were the result of a unique coincidence of pressures and stimuli. It was an even more delicate and fleeting thing than the primitives of Italy, far too frail to withstand the Ottoman blizzard; and who could expect four centuries of Grecos? This too, the culmination of Byzantine art, was a freak, the explosive fusion of three contradictory civilizations with perhaps the most eccentric genius on record; and he died without offspring.
The old significances took wing and religious symbolism, gaining talismanic power of its own, assumed new connotations. The Cross and all its sacred pictorial accompaniment were no longer an indication of the Logos and the divine mysteries, but, quite simply, the opponents of the Crescent: family totems that lent celestial sanction to those humbler and more direct implements of rescue, the yataghan, the scimitar and the long-barrelled gun. In this new function Greek iconography—which had been alive and developing, with periods of coma, since the mosaic and sculpture of the scattered declining kingdoms left by the conquests of Alexander and the dusky wide-eyed paintings in Fayoum—seized up: and in the dark period before the first glimmer of freedom, its life ebbed imperceptibly away. It survived for the remainder of its span only as heraldry—a recondite, archaizing and beautiful skill held captive by an untransgressible code (obsolete of its true function in England since the Battle of Tewkesbury, when, for the last time, symbol and essence and purpose were exactly congruent)—may still be said to survive. Gleaming smokily in the concavity of churches and presiding as familiar lares in every house, from Trebizond to Corfu and from Macedonia to Cyprus, ikons were the arms-parlant, the shields, devices, helmets, crowns, crests, supporters and the stiff swirl of mantelling of the King and Queen, the warriors and the magicians, of a lost Arthurian Byzantine Olympus to which they would come back again one day.
* * *
These ramifying tendrils of digression have obscured, like a tangle of ivy, the walls of the desolate little church of Layia from which they sprang. The reader may think (and he is right) that they have slowed up our progress along the east flank of the Mani. We will shake loose and get a move on.
What really held us up at the time were, of course, not these leisurely historico-religious broodings at all, but astonishment at the battered and cobwebby frescoes on these very walls. They ran round the church like a sequence of comic strips. The rectangular cartouches contained what can only be called religious cartoons. So uncouth were they that it was hard to believe one’s eyes. There was no traceable kinship either with the last rustic descendant of the ancient iconography, examples of which are common enough, or with any of the primitive religious paintings which followed its demise. Most of these illustrate local saints usually martyred by the Turks, and often quite recently, for trying to convert them, e.g. the only Koutzovlach saint, Nicholas of Karditza who was burnt at the stake in the Pindus Mountains; the kilted St. George of Yanina, painted as he swung from the gallows where the Turks hanged him in 1838, and St. Gideon of Tyrnavos, slowly dismembered, slain, and flung down a privy by Veli the Pasha of Thessaly and second son of the terrible Vizier, Ali Pasha, in 1818.[17] They are mostly in northern and central Greece. But there were none of the give-away contemporary details here. The usual scenes in the life of Christ were depicted, the Nativity, Epiphany, Baptism, Transfiguration, the Marriage at Cana with rows of spherical wine jars, the raising of Lazarus with the invariable tombside figure burying his nose in his robe against the possible reek of corruption, the Entry into Jerusalem under arching palm fronds, the stages of the Passion, the Ascension and the cloven flames of Pentecost. They looked very old and quite free of any known influence and so gangling and awkward and comic, and at the same time so uninhibited by any kind of rule that one would, at a glance, have dated them in England as coeval with the Saxon paintings of Chaldron or Worth. It was with the same shock of surprise as that prompted by the date of the Nyklian tower at Pyrgos, and another sharp reminder of the Mani’s isolation from the outside world, that I spotted at last a figured oblong with the year they were painted. It was 1851.
Very often in old frescoes the painted eyes of the saints have been scratched or picked out with sharp instruments, leaving ragged white holes in the plaster that make a painful impression. There is usually an old villager at one’s elbow to tell one that it is the sacrilegious work of Turks, and probably it often is. (On the lake-islands of Yanina, the saintly ranks are riddled with fanatic bullet-holes.) It is one of the commonplaces of Greek travel, as common as the “miraculous” way in which an ikon’s eyes, painted, as they nearly always are, gazing straight ahead, “follow you all over the church.” Some of these mutilations were visible on these walls, and before discovering the date I pointed to an empty socket and asked Vasilio (knowing, as I thought, the answer) what had happened. She laughed and said nothing, so I asked her again.
“É!” she said, “people in former times—perhaps even today—used to dig out the plaster and sprinkle it on the food or wine of people they wanted to fall in love with them. Girls mostly...”
“It wasn’t done by the Turks?”
“The Turks? Why?”
She had never heard of it! Was this another indication of the Mani’s impregnability? Or are the Turks elsewhere less guilty in this particular matter than it is thought?[18] It is a tradition I would find it hard to relinquish.
[1] The birth of St. John the Baptist marks midsummer day, but the feast of his decapitation, on the 29th of August, the Decollation, is known as the day of Ayios Ioannes Apokephalistheis—St. John the Beheaded. This past-participle passive is often mispronounced by peasants (in certain circumstances, theta turns very easily into tau), as the active form, apokephalistes, which turns him into St. John the Headsman; and I think, among the very simple, a vague idea does actually prevail that they are celebrating a saint who held this office.
[2] Also Philo the Neoplatonist, Thule king of Egypt, Balaam and the Sybil.
[3] Where, too, it might also be asked, would St. Thomas Aquinas have been a thousand years later, without the friendly guidance of Aristotle?
[4] Ancient Greek music, alas, died without leaving a trace or clue, beyond the surmise of musicologists on the various modes. Greek ecclesiastical music, which evolved in early Christian times, and the Gregorian plainsong of the West both derive from the Synagogue; particularly, thinks Dr. Egon Wellesz (see his Byzantine Music and Hymnography. Oxford, Clarendon Press), from the great temples of Jerusalem and Antioch. Hebrew liturgy was familiar to at least the first generation of Christians and it was through traditional music that the Psalter was disseminated among the Gentiles.
[5] I have laid great stress on passionless detachment in the depiction of divine figures; but a critic could marshal a damaging array of exceptions. Were I engaged on such a task I would begin with the stupendous mosaic of Christ Pantocrator at Daphni in Attica, Whose great eyes, dark and exorbitant and cast almost furtively over one shoulder, at total variance with His right hand’s serene gesture of blessing and admonition, spell not only pain but fear, anguish and guilt, as though He were in flight from an appalling doom. The only fit setting for such an expression is the Garden of Gethsemane; but this is a Christ-God in His glory, the All Powerful One. It is tremendous, tragic, mysterious and shattering.
[6] It is better known under its name as a mosque, the Kahrie Djami.
[7] See page 184.
[8] Though the Franks were driven from the seat of empire itself in 1271, the Byzantine empire that still remained out of infidel hands had been sliced up and distributed in fiefs among the crusading magnates. Outside the City and its surroundings, the only important remainder still in Byzantine hands was the despotate of Mistra, the Ducas despotate of Epirus and the young sister empire of the Comnenes at Trebizond. The mainland was the share of French overlords, and the entire archipelago went to the Doge.
[9] See A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor (John Murray, 1957).
[10] I warmly recommend to the reader The Birth of Western Painting by Robert Byron and David Talbot Rice. He will follow and perhaps disagree with the complex arguments elucidating how the same trends blossomed exactly simultaneously in Florence where, possibly short-circuiting Constantinople and Athos, Byzantine painting had already been at work; and in Sienna in the pictures of Giotto and Duccio, and thus of Cimabue and Lorenzetti and Barna da Siena and the best of the trecento. He will not only be able to compare the photographs but read a magnificent appreciation of the prominence and eclipse of Byzantine art; and also, incidentally, enjoy some of the most spirited, uncircumspect and powerful English prose written this century. It has the quality of a high-mettled horse. He will smile at the brio with which Robert Byron deals with obstacles and opposition. Instead of evading or dismantling them he points the target out, as it were with a sabre, and then, with dazzling bravura, clears it in a magnificent leap or gallops over it roughshod, slashes and kicks it to matchwood and rides on.
[11] Letter to Dorotheus the Deacon. This way of mystical thought became endemic in the West. See especially the contemplation In Caligine of Jiacopone da Todi (Lauda LX), and, of course, the Cloud of Unknowing.
[12] See page 39 n.
[13] See my “Monasteries of the Air,” The Cornhill Magazine, No. 986.
[14] My mind flies to the Zantiot painters Doxaras and Katouni.
[15] It was vividly described to me by the late Professor Dawkins, who visited it in the early years of the century.
[16] In this context, I would like to recommend most strongly Mr. Philip Sherrard’s remarkable book, The Marble Threshing Floor (Vallentine Mitchell), on Greece’s five greatest poets since the War of Independence: Solomos, Palamas, Sikelianos, Cavafy and Seferis.
[17] The fragments of St. Gideon, when retrieved, immediately cohered in an outburst of the odour of sanctity and they have been credited since with many miracles. It must be remembered that Thessaly and Epirus, and all of Greece to the north, were in Turkish hands until the First Balkan War in 1912.
[18] Another odd peculiarity in Greek churches: though men are allowed behind the three-doored iconostasis, it is, at any rate usually, out of bounds for women. I could never understand what this discrimination and suggestion of defilement was based on. Shortly after the war an old priest was showing three people—a woman and two men, of which I was one—some frescoes in a church between Kozani and Kastoria. The best, he said, were in the sanctuary. I pointed to our companion and asked if she could come. He scratched his beard in puzzlement and whispered a question. I didn’t at first understand. At last I grasped that exceptions could sometimes be made; they depended, rather embarrassingly, on feminine physiology and the phases of the moon, a gloomy veto that must go back to the fifteenth chapter of Leviticus. Rare mentions in ancient literature put this matter in a wholly different light. In fact the philosopher and physicist Democritus, echoed by Pliny and Columella, held that if maidens, at the appropriate times, ran three times round a field that was about to be harvested, the standing crops—whose early growth may perhaps have been fostered by sprinkling with ashes mixed with the urine of centaurs—were guaranteed against the onslaught of noxious insects. The contrast between Hebrew jurisconsults and kind Demeter needs no underlining.