Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon

Seeing the World with the Eyes of God

Clemena Antonova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317051817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book contributes to the re-emerging field of 'theology through the arts' by proposing a way of approaching one of the most challenging theological concepts - divine timelessness - through the principle of construction of space in the icon. One of the main objectives of this book is to discuss critically the implications of 'reverse perspective', which is especially characteristic of Byzantine and Byzantining art. Drawing on the work of Pavel Florensky, one of the foremost Russian religious philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century, Antonova shows that Florensky's concept of 'supplementary planes' can be used productively within a new approach to the question. Antonova works up new criteria for the understanding of how space and time can be handled in a way that does not reverse standard linear perspective (as conventionally claimed) but acts in its own way to create eternalised images which are not involved with perspective at all. Arguing that the structure of the icon is determined by a conception of God who exits in past, present, and future, simultaneously, Antonova develops an iconography of images done in the Byzantine style both in the East and in the West which is truer to their own cultural context than is generally provided for by western interpretations. This book draws upon philosophy, theology and liturgy to see how relatively abstract notions of a deity beyond time and space enter images made by painters.

Chapter 1
The Role of Time in the Pictorial Art

In the present chapter, it is argued that time is a fundamental organizing principle of pictorial art. The widely accepted, but not unchallenged, distinction between spatial and temporal arts, popularized by Lessing, is considered to be flawed, since it is unable to account for the complex nature of the arts. Further, the spatial organization that underlies the image is accepted to entail, by necessity, the conception of time. Before considering the concrete case of the temporal dimension of the case of the icon, as based on the writings of Pavel Florensky, some attention needs to be devoted to the underlying assumptions of the widely accepted space-time categorization of the arts.

The Problem of Time in the Visual Arts – Seeing a Picture “in the Twinkling of an Eye”

Visual art is usually taken to be a matter of the manipulation of the material in space while the temporal dimension is often disregarded. This has largely been so both on the intuitive level and in the realm of academic discourse. Indeed, most would agree with W. Thomas Mitchell when he says that “nothing […] seems more intuitively obvious that the claim that literature is an art of time, painting an art of space”.1 It seems evident that painting has “no natural temporal extension”.2 In the critical history of the visual arts the problem of time has remained peripheral and when touched upon, the prevailing view has tended to suppress the temporal dimension. Otto Pächt, for instance, is expressing a wide-spread view, when he describes the history of pictorial art as “a series of repeated attempts to smuggle the time factor into a medium which, by definition, lacks the dimension of time”.3

What Mitchell calls “the tradition of denying temporality in the visual arts”4 can be attributed, to a large extent, to the impact of Lessing’s Laocoön (1766). The division of the arts into arts of time and those of space is traditional and had long been in existence before the publication of the Laocoön. Gombrich points out that even Joseph Spence and the Comte de Caylus, whom Lessing cited as having ignored the space-time distinction, actually are explicitly aware of it.5 Most famously, Leonardo maintained that “painting immediately presents to you the demonstrations its maker has intended”, while “the works of the poets must be read over a long span of time” and further that painting “simultaneously conveys the proportional harmony of which the parts of the whole are composed”, while poetry describes “the configurations of particular objects more slowly than is accomplished by the eye”.6 Leonardo’s position, however, is a bit more complicated, I think, but I will return to that later.

It was Lessing (1729–1781), however, who was the first to systematically treat this question and popularize this distinction. His position has been hugely influential since and was questioned only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Goethe (1749–1832) bears witness to its impact at the time:

“One would have to be a young man again to realize the effect wrought upon us by Lessing’s Laokoon […] transported us from the region of slavish observation into the free fields of speculative thought. The long misunderstood ut pictura poesis was at once set aside. The difference between picture and poetry was made clear – the peaks of both appeared separate, however near might be their bases.”7

In his 1920s ‘Creative Credo’ Paul Klee’s (1879–1940) response is quite different:

“In Lessing’s Laokoon, on which we squandered study time when we were young, much fuss is made about the difference between temporal and spatial art. Yet, looking into the matter more closely, we find all this is but a scholastic delusion. For space, too, is a temporal concept.”8

Apparently it seemed to Goethe and others at the time that Lessing had solved a genuine problem. But had he, later generations would ask? If there is a fundamental difference between painting and poetry, between image and language, would it come down to a space-time distinction? Besides, in Goethe’s own metaphor it would appear that things are very much a matter of emphasis, depending on which part of the intersection between the two figures of painting and poetry we would choose to investigate. The closer to the “bases” is our analysis the more likely it would be that we emphasize the unity of the two arts. The nearer to the “peaks” we go the more we will tend to see differences and specificities. William Wimsatt in his essay on Lessing is well aware of that, while he himself tends to the position that “the arts are in fact considerably different from one another”.9 Svetlana and Paul Alpers, similarly, see the statement, attributed to Simonides (556–468 BC),10 that poetry is a speaking picture and painting a mute poesy as “more witty than truthful”11 and put the stress on the profound difference among the arts in their conditions and “languages”.12 Gombrich has a like concern to show that “the means of visual art cannot match the statement function of language”.13

On the other hand, Horace’s tradition of the ut pictura poesis (literally “as poetry, so painting”) belongs to another stream of literary and art criticism in its emphasis on the unity of the arts, which has been a constant theme of aesthetics as an academic discipline. It was brought to an extreme in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and especially by French and English critics, as Rensslelaer Lee points out in a well-known article. Lee is right to find Dryden’s comparison between the two arts in ‘A Parallel of Poetry and Painting’ (1695) “absurdly elaborate”,14 while fifty years after Dryden the Abbé Batteaux published an essay in the same spirit under the telling title ‘The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle’ (1746).15 In the second half of the nineteenth century Walter Pater bears witness to a similar trend when he says at the opening of his essay ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877): “It is a mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting – all the various products of art – as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought”.16 Irving Babbitt provides a useful insight into the state of the confusion of the arts which had been reached at the time in his work The New Laocoon (1910). The analogies between painting and poetry that Aristotle in the Poetics and Horace in the Ars poetica had drawn had grown into virtual identifications, something which the ancient texts had never intended.17 In Jean Hagstrum’s words, Aristotle’s view on the arts would make them appear as cousins rather than sisters,18 while Horace’s dictum should not be interpreted as “let a poem be like a painting”, but rather “as a painting, so also a poem” or “as sometimes in a painting, so occasionally in poetry”.19

The Antique analogies between the arts could just as well serve as an authority to the other stream of thought which attempts to categorize the arts according to various criteria. There have been different systems of categorization and the division between spatial and temporal arts is one among the many. The question is if it is a viable one and if it discloses anything of universal significance about the nature of the arts. If we come to feel that Lessing has overstrained the divisions, this too should be understood in a historical context. Lessing was reacting against the other extreme just mentioned. It has been noticed how he was anticipated by La Fontaine (1621–1695), who, ironizing the tradition of ut pictura poesis at his time, had remarked:

Les mots et les couleurs ne sont choses pareilles

Ni les yeux ne sont les oreilles.20

(Words and colours are not comparable things

The eyes are not the ears).

The problem of time arose in the context of debates on the nature of the visual and/versus the verbal arts. Etienne Sourian points out in his essay “Time in the Plastic Arts’ (1945) that the visual arts, as all arts in general, involve a “psychological time of contemplation”.21 This is valid not only in the cases of architecture and sculpture in the round, where a moving spectator is obviously presupposed. Sourian rightly maintains that even in the case of painting a “time of contemplation is required”.22 John Dryden, too, realized this aspect of the problem and he says in his essay “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting” that, while the elements of a picture “are to be discerned all at once, in the twinkling of an eye”, this is so only provisionally “if sight could travel over so many objects all at once, or the mind could digest them all at the same instant or point of time”.23 The author gives us an example with Poussin’s The Institution of the Blessed Sacrament, where the many figures and the various actions they perform would require that the picture be “seen by intervals” and “considered at leisure”.24 I do not think Leonardo would have disagreed with this observation as he was talking about something else – a picture can convey a total impression at first glance, whatever other characteristics a further contemplation might reveal, in a way that poetry cannot. Therefore, the perception of harmony depends on the medium of presentation. In poetry, the effect of harmony is, as if disrupted, since “the words with which he [the poet] delineates the elements of beauty are separated from one another by time, which leaves voids between them and dismembers the proportions”.25 On the other hand, the effect of painting is total in that “it simultaneously conveys the proportional harmony of which the parts of the whole are composed”.26

The problem posed here would...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Role of Time in the Pictorial Art
• 2 On Reverse Perspective – a Critical Reading
• 3 Registering Presence in the Icon
• 4 “Seeing the World with the Eyes of God”: An Alternative Explanation of “Reverse Perspective”
• Conclusion
• Sample Analysis An Analysis of Rublev’s Trinity Icon in the Terms, Proposed in this Book
• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography
• Index