A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY
|
|
|
| Volume 6 Number 15 - Tuesday, April 13th, 2004 |
A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY |
|
• Search Engine
The 2003 Angel Fund Appeal • OCN Website
• The Video - "A New Era Begins"
|
The Orthodox Christian News Service |
|
|
Beholding Byzantium The galleries of a major exhibition like “Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557),” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are nearly always filled with formulaic poses. One viewer clasps his hands behind his back, which allows him to lean in closer to the objects without alarming the guards. One viewer lets her head settle back between her shoulder blades as though looking up in a stand of redwoods, while another peers intently from the side of a painted panel, as if hoping to see between its layers. Then there are the hordes of the disembodied, wearing headphones, staggering limply from one numbered object to the next, as if the voices they were hearing were more than curatorial. How viewers move through the galleries seems especially striking at “Byzantium” because the exhibition itself abounds in symbolic poses. The 300 years represented in “Byzantium” capture a spiritual and artistic impulse radiating outward from Constantinople, which, after 1261, was again the center of the Orthodox Church. That impulse echoes in image after image from across the Byzantine world. Throughout the galleries, iconic Virgins gesture toward the infants they hold in their arms. The gestures vary, but each specific pose expresses a different state of being, a different projection of authority and grace. It's as though one could become a different person by choosing to point with the left hand rather than the right.
And there, in
front of a 14th-century icon, stands a young woman
— a visitor — trying out the open-handed gesture
that Mary uses to point to her son. As the young
woman adopts that posture her head tilts slightly
to mirror the tilt of the Virgin's head. We are so
used to the word “iconic” that we forget how
forceful the stylization of actual icons can be.
But it isn't merely the formality of the poses
that makes these images iconic. It's their
emotional radiance, the astonishing difference
that a hand held this way — or that — can make. |
|
Home • Archives • Search • Submissions • Support Us |
||
|
Orthodox News, PO BOX 6954 |
