History of icons up to 1400

From the Fayoum portraits to the fall of Byzantium

The Fayoum portraits date from the 1st to the 4th century AD in Egypt, which was then under Roman rule. They are mummy portraits, which were painted during people's lives and wrapped in the cloths of the mummy, trimmed at the corners at the place of the face. Their origin was completely incomprehensible in the half of the 19th century, but at the beginning of the 20th century there were these English, German and French archaeologists, such as Carter, Evans, Schliemann and Champollion, who made startling excavations - so there was also Flinders Petrie, who had done important work earlier in Palestine, and in Egypt he brought out the Fayoum portraits. And he was able to date them. In my opinion, at that time, there was an itinerant guild of painters throughout the Eastern Roman Empire making portraits of the rich people. Because why are they so beautiful, so professional? Fayoum may have been a prosperous village 50 km. from Cairo, but small. Beeswax is heatened to apply the pigment, and the technique is impressionistic. One works with different areas of color. Now there exist also icons from the 6th to 7th centuries that are preserved, also painted in beeswax. So I conclude, it must have been the same portrait painters who were everywhere in what was then the Eastern Roman Empire, incidentally also a Hellenistic empire (that dated back to Alexander of 330 BC), a mixed culture of all kinds of different peoples with a clear cultural language, Greek. So in the Sinai Monastery there are some icons in wax tempera, in the completely impressionistic style of the Fayoum portraits. I am thinking of the saint Peter, the Mother of God with the two Theodoruses and the primordial icon of all Pantokrator icons, the Pantokrator of Sinai.

How would that have ended with those Fayoum portraits in the 4th century? Constantine in 312 by the edict of Arles recognized Christianity as a permitted religion, religio licita it was called. And I think the reason for his decision was political. The Roman Empire was the greatest empire ever, a world empire, but a politician looks for a common idea or an illusion, or an identity for all the people in the empire, because such an idea then works as cement for society, an identity. Civil law was passé, because it was not for everyone, slaves were exempt from it, for example. Christianity had a lot of competition: you had cults of Astarte, a Phoenician goddess, the Persian Mithras, very important at this time, Osiris and Isis from Egypt, Eleusinian Mysteries from the Greek religion, only for initiates, the Olympic gods with Afrodite (Venus), and you had the retoric schools that continued the classical philosophy of the academies of Plato and Aristotle. In a city like Alexandria, you could sacrifice in a different temple every day, and many people did. It does show that it was society immersed in religion, and that religion existed in many ways. Constantine's mother, according to tradition, became a Christian in any case, and that may have influenced his decision. In any case, the potential of Christianity was to bind all these people of the Roman Empire. When the first ecumenical council met at Nicea in 325, it turned out that really bright minds of high philosophical caliber worked for Christianity to establish the creed. Yes, if you had an eye for it ... Christianity had a future. Also in 325, Constantine made the city of Byzantium, today's Istanbul on the Bosphorus, the capital of the empire in order to be able to defend the empire against the eastern world, against the steppe people of Mongolia and Central Asia. This also succeeded, because it was not the Eastern Roman empire that collapsed due to the invasions of the barbaric tribes, but the western part. The separation of the empires is actually final in 395. Also in 395, under Theodosius, Christianity becomes the only allowed religion.

So what did Constantine's politics mean for Christian art? Fayoum portraits were no longer allowed because the Egyptian dead cult was banned. The Romans were in charge in Egypt. In Rome, Christian art came to the surface. In the catacombs, you can see that first the Christian faith was depicted with symbols of the anchor, the cross, the boat, the fish, the good shepherd, the lamb, and then after 325 the first Christian art came to Italy. To Palestine people liked to go on pilgrimage, and there you get the first iconic representations on ampoules, which included the water of the Jordan River, for example. On those are very early depictions of Mother of God. Palestine I think could very well have been the first place where icons were created. They are written about, one church father is for them and another is against them. But icons are coming into vogue, actually more and more in the lives of Christians. They were, as mentioned, initially painted in wax tempera....

Egg tempera must have been introduced after the year 600, and I have some ideas about that. Now when in history were chickens first raised that produced a somewhat reasonable number of eggs? Perhaps that beginning coincides with the beginning of egg tempera. I myself haven't done any research on that yet. You also can skip a few hundred years for icons, because they also had an iconoclasm in Byzantium, then all the icons were smashed, so very little remains. And an iconic style begins to develop around 900, and this is a very natural one even to our eyes, a saint with blue undergarment, I believe, St. Philip, with angular forms of light on his leg, that is, the impressionism of the wax tempera is abandoned, and then you get what we call the fragmented lights, the geometric shapes on the clothes. Then in the time coming you have the different styles of painting and they are named after the dynasties of the emperors. So painting of the tenth century undergoes a kind of impetus from the Macedonian emperors, who were conquerors. The style is monumental, proud, as if the icons want to say, these are the saints of the conquerors. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries you have the Komnenian style, which is a little retro, they go and look in the manuscripts, so beautiful, and there they find the images that rest on the classical Greek and Hellenistic language of form, on the Hellenistic art that arose after Alexander, which then again has its basis in the classical forms, in the classical ideas of beauty of the human face, of animals and plants. And these the Komnenians, oddly enough, pick up again almost 1,000 years later. Something else that characterizes the Komnenian style is the precise, the contrived, the mannerist. The technique was flawlessly mastered and the icons are often a bit overdone; there is an urge for refinement. The Komnenians experienced the capture of the capital by the Crusaders in 1204 and fled to Nicea. The next lineage, the Paleologians, recaptured the city in 1260. And you thought it would mean peace? But then the Turks came, of course. You see it in the icons, too. You see tormented people and saints with terror in their eyes. With all kinds of emotions. It doesn't belong on icons at all, because the saints live in heaven and are happy, they are in a glorified state. On the icons and the walls of Athos you see really tormented faces and spastic gestures, expressing pain. After 1300 you get a real religious struggle, the hesuchastic struggle, it is then between the mystics and the rationalists. The former said, you can see the divine light and man must strive for deification, and that's also possible. And the rationalists said, everything you believe you can actually reason about, just look at the West, there you have scholasticism, it is thesis and antithesis and conclusio, so there is actually little mystery. Of course, it was the intellectuals who spoke that way, who had contact with the West. And there were victims, because it was fought over, because if the emperor had chosen a side, of course he would have the opponent eliminated at some point entirely in Byzantine style. And under that fighting the people also suffered very much. But it seems that because of the violence, at least in this period, that people start to focus on the mystical in the icons. So then again you see a reflection of that time in the icons. The mystics won, and it is now a dogma in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the beholding of the divine light and the mystical way to God. The West does not know that, or at least in the East it is explicitly stated, and it has some more aspects. What are the icons like from this time? Those are terribly spiritualized, tremendously spiritual. How so? That actually it is not so much about the face of the saint, but more about what that saint thinks, and what he expresses. And the icons of the hesuchastic period are so spiritual, shall I say, that they almost seem to be Russian icons. For the Russians we know. It very much expresses the content of faith, devotion and humility.

Then I started thinking. So is that period perhaps a link between Russian and Greek? So if you look at the years, those very mystical icons of the Greeks were created at the same time as their Russian counterparts! I conclude that it blew over from Greece to Russia. And from Russia we know that it has always remained that way. The Russian icons have remained mystical and devout, an expression of faith. And the Greek icons went back after the hesuchastic period to a little more human expression of the saints, and the Russians did not. Now if you want to have an example of the last Greek period, it's the Michael that is in the Byzantine Museum, that's a late Byzantine icon, and in it you see again the fact that the saints have ordinary human faces, actually more portraits, so realistic and remotely continuing the Hellenistic style. And that's where Byzantine painting ended up.

There is also a name that designates the whole northern Greek style, and that is the Macedonian School. And that includes everything that happens in northern Greece. As long as it's not Cretan. So you have those twisted influences from the time of the war, that's all North Greek. And you have a great master in northern Greece, Pansélinos on Athos, also important painter with fantastic frescoes, you would almost say, that's a genius, well he probably was, you have painters in Ochrid, Ochrid on Lake Ochrid, in Macedonia, you have Serbian painting, Serbian then within the Macedonian School is a very important regional style, and very beautiful, which is very little studied, but icons of great class. And the Serbs have a monastery on Athos, which is Chilandari, and you'll probably come and read about that at some point, and see those icons, and then you have to admit, yes, this is heartbreaking. Serbia was a great Balkan empire with its own monarch, a bit of an imperialist empire, and within the Macedonian School an important style. And Ochrid is a marvel of icon painting, it's also part of Serbian painting. It has been an archdiocese and it has been very influential in the Balkans, because the painters are also all very talented and almost geniuses. I heard someone say, he has been in Ochrid, and he became an icon lover, that's how it worked. So if you don't like icons yet, you should go to Ochrid. Over the northern Greek border is the state of Macedonia, and Ochrid must be in that, and then you get Kosovo, and then Serbia.

Still speaking about the northern Greek or Macedonian school of painting in general: that is more or less a topographical designation. Then you can say anything that is Byzantine, (so if it looks like the Michael of the Byzantine Museum), if it depicts the saint, 't is not that it doesn't look like the saint, they've always taken good care of that, if it's a realistic portrait, it pretty much falls under that. 'T is the middle of the road, there are few rules, there is freedom, it is less than the Cretan school based on rules, and a fixed program, and fixed technical approach to e.g. the hair, that does not exist in Northern Greece. The term is actually the amalgama of what is painted in Northern Greece. And of course it has similarities and gigantic differences between them, but that's what you have with a style that is not really defined by the painters themselves. One style stands out, and that is the Serbian style.