Post #8: Departures from Nature

Week Nine Post:  Byzantine and Early Medieval Art

Stylization

The three angels shown in The Old Testament Trinity (Three Angels Visiting Abraham) on page 258 are stylized using some Byzantine conventions.  This late Byzantine work by the monk Andrey Rublov was painted between 1410 and 1425 in Russia, which was the last bastion of the Byzantine style.  It is somewhat narrative in that it tells the Old Testament story of the visitation of Abraham and Sarah by three divine beings but it is also iconic as it can be interpreted as a New Testament representation of the Holy Trinity.   I call it somewhat narrative because Abraham and Sarah aren’t shown in this painting at all; only their house and the tree of Mamre suggest a connection to the Old Testament story.  Abraham and Sarah have been left out of the picture to limit the subject matter (a Byzantine convention) to the trinity of angels and their New Testament story.   These angels have the elongated bodies, arms and legs.  They each have the flat circular halo to denote them as divine beings and small gold wings that don’t seem large enough to bear their weight; wings are there only to indicate that they are angels.  Their identical faces show them to be one being in three bodies and they have the long, narrow noses small mouths and large eyes common in the Byzantine style.  They are wearing robes which seem to fall in heavy folds, concealing the body, except for prominent features like knees.  These figures are seated in a naturalistic manner around the table; they are not arranged in a line like in the earlier Byzantine style.  It seems that the stylized elongation of the figures indicates the pull and reach for heaven as if a holy person or being can stretch up and then just keep rising forever.

     I think that some of the most stylized art forms that we read about were the Hiberno-Saxon works (a style which I had always previously called Celtic).  The 7^th century Hinged Clasp from the Sutton Hoo Burial Ship on page 428 seems to be a relatively simple piece in comparison with some of the others from a similar style and era, yet the floral and animal themes pictured are almost unrecognizable as such because of the extreme stylization.  The rectangles of millefiori (thousand flowers) are of colorful red and blue glass inlay and are a geometrical floral type that resembles nothing in nature.  The enameled snakes that border the millefiori are knotted and twisted into forms that make it difficult to tell where they begin and end; even the serpent’s heads are beaked, almost bird-like.  The boars on the arched parts of the clasp don’t look like pigs as we might draw them.  They overlap and yet both heads and both tail ends are visible, with the heads toward the center of the piece, facing outward and the rears on the outside, facing inward- if that makes sense.  The pigs' back bones make up the arched portion of the piece and overlap in such a way as to create a continuous curve with no notch in the center.  The boars have everything a pig has from snout to curly tail and yet I had to read the description and look very closely before I could see them. 

     The Chi Rho Iota Page from the Book of Kells from the 8th or 9^th century on page 422 shows even more decoration and much stylization of the main subjects, which in this case are the letters.  Only the black outlines keep the letters’ forms from being completely lost in swirling knots and geometric shapes.  Human faces appear in improbable places and the animal forms that appear as part of the design are stylized until they are barely recognizable.  In this genre bodies are also often elongated but then they are manipulated, knotted and twisted into unnatural conformations.    In these designs, the closer one examines the details, the more details appear into a smaller and smaller infinity and the knots seem to draw one into inward contemplation instead of reaching outward to heaven.   Some human figures look like the images on playing cards and the figures of the cats and mice are realistically depicted in comparison to any other identifiable creature and seem a departure from the usual stylization.