Tea at Trianon: The Changing Face of Byzantine Sacred Art

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 12, 2025

The Changing Face of Byzantine Sacred Art

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

Many western Christians who are not regularly exposed to them have an idea that all Byzantine or “eastern” iconography looks the same.
It’s easy to see why: after 500+ years of adulating the illusionistic naturalism of the Renaissance, the stylized, formal and symbolic aesthetic of Byzantine icons can seem like a foreign world. And I think these stylistic differences are a big part of what keeps the two sides separated.
We westerners, used to our naturalism, tend to not think much about them, and assume that they’re all more or less the same. And it’s true that the forms have a visual stylistic consistency; we know what “Byzantine icons” means. But once you start looking more closely, we see there is a much more complex and historically nuanced development, as there is in western art. Over the centuries, Byzantine iconography changed and developed dramatically, shaped by theological debates, political upheavals and cultural influences.
Our timeframe of iconography stretches across vast temporal and spatial distances, from the earliest frescoes of the catacombs in old Rome to the deeply symbolic, highly stylized icons of post-Byzantine (Constantinopolitan) Orthodox traditions. And it was carried out to the outer corners of the Christian world; we can see the same motifs, the same language spoken, from Ireland, Scotland and Lindisfarne, to Cappadocia to Ethiopia. (Read more.)