The subject was a Christ and eleven apostles (life size), and the time taken to complete the work was under an hour!
I am not quite sure but what a couple of months’ experience in the Mount Athos workshops might not be of advantage to some of our students in the antique school.
Our traveller adds (I think quite unnecessarily) that the work seemed to him very rude and coarse—but it can be easily understood that at this rate a whole church could be covered with frescoes in a few days. “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas de l’art.”
From what I have said, you will understand the unchangeable nature of Byzantine art. Pictures painted in this style may be more or less neatly executed, but their artistic merit varies very little, whether they be of the seventh or the nineteenth centuries, whether they decorate St. Mark’s at Venice or an obscure monastery on Mount Athos. As an illustration of this, note a picture in the National Gallery, by a Greek artist of the name of Emmanuel. The date of this work is 1650. It was therefore painted long after Titian, Raffaelle, P. Veronese, and all the great masters had departed this life, and yet with all their glorious works before his eyes what does this primeval artist produce? All I can say is, “Go and see for yourselves.” Other schools have their ups and downs. The Italian, the Flemish, the French, and the English schools have all had, and will continue to have, their periods of elevation and depression; but Byzantine painting always maintains its dead level, and will continue to do so as long as the Greek Church lasts.
Pictures of this school are often associated with ideas of sanctity, not only in holy Russia but in Western Europe. Almost all miracle-working pictures belong to this class. The Calabrian peasant, or the Andalusian muleteer, who would probably be unmoved by the Madonna di S. Sisto, is wrought up to a high pitch of religious fervor at the shrine of some olive Byzantine Virgin, with her pinched peevish face and wooden shoulders.
That this class of pictures has at all times been held to be peculiarly sacred, is proved from the fact that at Venice (even in the time of Titian) the cultivation of the stiff Byzantine style, for popular devotion, was maintained in juxtaposition with that of the most perfectly developed form of painting.
We may smile at the Venetian religious world, but I am not sure that at the present day an analogous tendency could not be imputed to some of us.
Is there not to some æsthetic nostrils a kind of odor of sanctity about mediæval perspective and composition? It is true that our revivalists do not wish to go back to the Byzantine period for our religious art; the Romanesque or at any rate the Quattro Cento style is the correct thing. But why go back at all? I can quite understand that in restoring an old cathedral it would be desirable to do so; but in a modern building (whether gothic or not) to reproduce forms which we know to be incorrect, and to introduce perspective which we know to be absurd, seems to me to be carrying our reverence for the past a little too far.
A letter appeared in the Times last summer which is so much to the purpose that I really must read it to you:—
“To the Editor of the ‘Times.’”