free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Art under the Venetians
masterpieces which are now in the Cathedral, for the last of them, the
icon of the Ecumenical Council of Nicaca, is dated 1591. If you look at
these paintings in turn: The Burning Bush, the Adoration of the Magi,
the Noli me Tangere, the Last Supper, the Divine Liturgy and the Ecumenical
Council: you may feel some puzzlement. Here was a man who knew
what was going on in the west, who had copied western paintings,
whose technique was excellent. How was he not bowled over by
Raphael and Tintoretto? How could he go home and paint these
indubitably Byzantine pictures?
Because he had to remain in the orthodox tradition. In a way the
surprising thing is that he absorbed so much that is western. Hadzidakis
notes Damaskinos’s debt to Tintoretto and to the engraver,
Marcantonio Raimondi, whose copies of Raphael also influenced
Theophanes the Cretan; and says of the Last Supper that it is perhaps
the first post-Byzantine painting to attempt a solution of the problem
of space on western lines. (For not only are the interior fittings and
columns western; so is the use of perspective in the walls and paving
slabs, and the feeling of three-dimensional space thus created. Even so,
Damaskinos has not ceased to use also that other space where a figure’s
size and position in the picture may depend not on the laws of perspective
but on his value and importance in the traditional hierarchy.)
Despite Damaskinos’s virtues and reputation there is something
wrong; for me at any rate. It is not easy to look at Byzantine art and
see what we are meant to see. Perhaps it is sometimes impossible; but
sometimes even the non-believer succeeds in making the imaginative
jump and seeing right. It is partly a negative approach that is required,
like the orthodox approach to God; i.e. it is a question of shutting out
some of the usual assumptions about art, of forgetting part of our
western tradition. Damaskinos, by referring to the western tradition,
made this impossible for me. I do not see what else he could have done,
for to have shut his eyes to the west would have been disastrous. His
imitators, by seizing on his works as prototypes, showed how even the
limited novelty supplied by Damaskinos was badly needed. Nevertheless,
those western elements which he used are enough, for me, to
shatter the illusion, or the reality – which it is depends on your belief
–which is the basis of Byzantine art. When I see the Last Supper I find
myself wanting a set of western qualities which are not there; as if,
having started to tread this slippery path, Damaskinos should have
gone further. But this is all subjective.
This excursus on Damaskinos is not as pointless as it might appear,
for his career is conveniently contrasted with that of another, greater
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