Interpreting Visual Arts in Late Antiquity I The Great Courses

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See the entire course available on The Great Courses: Late Antiquity: Crisis and Transformation http://bit.ly/1yinWyP View the latest content from The Great Courses: http://bit.ly/TGC_Home There was a very powerful strain in Greek philosophy that it always rejected figural representations. They had said, for example, that figural representations were incapable of expressing ineffable realities. They insisted that dross matter was so unlike what it tried to represent that it was impossible for matter to represent anything truly important, truly significant. What was truly important, truly significant? Yes, you could make, for instance, a representation of a particular person, or one could make a representation of an example, a charioteer, an athlete of some kind. But what one really wanted to reveal were the qualities of mind and heart, the qualities of character, and these kinds of things, it was said, simply could not be revealed by any kind of a visual image. My point is that—and there's an irony in this—despite the fact that Greeks, and then after them Romans too, produced art in profusion, there was always a very powerful philosophical current that ran against the production of such art. In the 16th century, the amazing archaeological discoveries of Christian art from the 2nd and 3rd centuries had yet to be made. Once we discovered all of this art, it became very clear that Christians had visual representations, and we'll talk about them in a little bit more detail and explicitly a little bit later in this lecture. My point for the moment is that Christians had these kinds of representations almost from the very beginning. Eusebius complained about pagan images. He complained about the matter of which they were made. This is a constant theme in those who had reservations about Christian visual arts, and again he insisted that it was impossible for an image to be equivalent to what it sought to portray. Partly, and this is a point again that will come up a couple of times in what follows, when he talks about it being impossible for an image to be equivalent to what it seeks to portray, he's thinking of course of pagan idols. The cult statue, for example, of this god or that goddess in a temple, which was actually believed to have the god or goddess present in it. Christian writers were very, very reluctant to accept that proposition. As late antiquity unfolded, a basic set of justifications for Christian art emerged, and in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, they have basically retained their validity to this day. Basil drew an analogy between Christian images and imperial images. Again, he's thinking a little bit here about cult statues in pagan temples and some of the reservations that perhaps some Christians had about any visual representation because it would be too much like these cult statues in pagan temples. What he says is that an act of reverence performed before an imperial image was not directed to that image, as if to a pagan idol, but instead to the person, in this case the emperor, who was represented. Basil uses imperial images, which were sent throughout the empire. We've talked about this in earlier lectures, too; he talks about imperial images by way of analogy with Christian images. He said that Christians do not worship those images; they worship before those images and their acts of worship or veneration are passed on to the person represented. Gregory of Nyssa, another of the Cappadocian Fathers, said that whenever he gazed upon an image of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, he couldn't help but weep. This became a very powerful defense of Christian art that again repeats itself in all sorts of context over a very long period of time. The point's quite simple: Images could evoke salutary emotions. Gregory also said, and this is really quite interesting, "Painting, even if it is silent, is capable of speaking from the wall and of being of the greatest benefit. When scenes of martyrdom are painted on the walls of a church, it is of the greatest benefit and it is like writing." Gregory of Nyssa was the first to draw an equivalence between verbal eloquence and the visual arts, to suggest somehow, as others would eventually say, that arts could be living speech.