Mani (34 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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.