www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Defending Renaissance art against Orthodox Christians

Michael Quenot in The icon: Window on the Kingdom (1996, p. 78) argues that the "crooked heads, cross-eyes, twisted bodies and bulging bosoms (in Renaissance art), express more the disintegrated state of modern man than his thirst for a reality beyond the material world'.

The Incarnation of the Trinity's Second Person is the centrum of Christian orthodoxy. But we are taught that the godhead in Christ, while he dwelled on earth, was effectively hidden -- insufficiently manifest for the Devil to recognize, obscured even from Christ's closest disciples (Mark 8:27-30; Matt. 16:13-20), apparent only to a handful of chosen initiates and a few beneficiaries of his miracles
By the testimony of Scripture, the manhood in Christ, though free from ignorance and sin, was otherwise indistinguishable -- not because the protagonist of the Gospels assumed a deceptive disguise (like a godling in pagan fable), but because he took real flesh in a woman's womb and endured it till death.
This much Christendom has professed at all times. Not so Christian art. For when a depictive style aims at the other-worldly; when the stuff of which human bodies are formed is attenuated and subtilized; when Christian representations of Christ, dismayed by the grossness of matter, decline to honor the corporeality God chose to assume -- then, whatever else such art may be after, the down-to-earth flesh of the bodied Word is not confessed.
It is arguable from a stylistic viewpoint -- at least in retrospect and from a Renaissance vantage -- that the hieratic Christs of Byzantine art are better adapted to Gnostic heresies than to a theology of Incarnation; for, to quote Otto Demus again, "The Byzantine image . . always remained a Holy Icon, without any admixture of earthly realism." But for those Western Christians who would revere the Logos in its human presence, it was precisely an "admixture of earthly realism" that was needed to flesh out the icon.
And because Renaissance culture not only advanced an incarnational theology (as the Greek Church had also done), but evolved representational modes adequate to its expression, we may take Renaissance art to be the first and last phase of Christian art that can claim full Christian orthodoxy. Renaissance art -- including the broad movement begun c.1260 -- harnessed the theological impulse and developed the requisite stylistic means to attest the utter carnality of God's humanation in Christ.

This extraordinary complex is a remarkably powerful expression of sacred art, rising to heights of imperishable aesthetic and religious excellence. What has characterized sacred art more and more, under the impulse of Humanism and the Renaissance, and then of successive cultural and scientific trends, is a growing interest in everything human, in the world, and in the reality of history. In itself, such a concern is not at all a danger for Christian faith, centred on the mystery of the Incarnation and therefore on God's valuing of the human being. The great artists mentioned above are a demonstration of this. Suffice it to think of the way in which Michelangelo represents the beauty of the human body in his painting and sculpture.

Originally posted by Orthodox Catholic:
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Sometimes the stern iconography of the East needs to be balanced by the warmer, more human pictorial representations of the West.
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Alex

For example, it would be very difficult to have a statue expressing the Transfiguration with everything it consists of - the 6 figures, the Divine light, the mountain etc. Icons are surely much better at expressing Christian dogma comprehensively.

Don't forget the role of stained glass in the West... great aids to prayer. I think there is more to this than just a comparison between statues and icons.

But stained glass is generally positioned quite far from the viewer. Doesn't this create a significant spiritual distance? This is compounded by the fact that the figures in stained glass and for that matter statues often don't look directly at the viewer, unlike in iconography.

Originally posted by Leao:
Renaissance art introduced secular artistic innovations into the traditional Christian iconography such as 3D perspective, natural light, shadow and perhaps most significantly its sensual over tone. A lot of Western religious art from the Renaissance period is almost indistinguishable from the secular art of the time other than by its religious theme.

While the appropriation of pagan elements into early Christian art was traditionally regarded as a 'Christianisation' of pagan art (e.g. the traditional pagan motif of the shepherd and his flock was easily propagated by Christians to express Christ the Good Shepherd), Orthodox art historians regard the appropriation of secular artistic elements during the Renaissance as a "paganisation of Christian art', an "obscuration' of the traditional transcendental nature of the Byzantine icon that was achieved in particular through the dissimulation of carnal elements that were later emphasized by Renaissance painters such as Raphael (see Quenot quote below). The traditional reversal of ways of seeing in the traditional icon, e.g. reverse perspective, and the subjection of the iconographer to artistic canons are generally understood by Orthodox theologians of the icon as a challenge to the fallen world in much the same way that the preaching of the Gospel (e.g. the Beatitudes) point in a direction opposite to the ways of the fallen world.

How can one defend the revolutionary upheaval in Catholic art during the Renaissance and the decline in the presence of the icon in Catholic churches? Leonid Ouspensky in The Theology of the Icon even describes the Renaissance as 'blasphemous', contradicting the 7th Ecumenical Council that precisely defined the exact role of the icon.

I would be very grateful for some help please!!
My thesis touches upon the aforementioned and I have not found any comprehensive defense of Renaissance art with reference to Orthodox criticism.

Thanks- Leo

Quote

Michael Quenot in The icon: Window on the Kingdom (1996, p. 78) argues that the "crooked heads, cross-eyes, twisted bodies and bulging bosoms (in Renaissance art), express more the disintegrated state of modern man than his thirst for a reality beyond the material world'.