Mani (36 page)

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.