Tea at Trianon: Byzantine and Carolingian 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

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Byzantine and Carolingian Art

Brilliant. From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

Icons to the eastern Christian to this day, are not “illustrations of the faith” intended to “teach illiterates Bible stories,” but points of immediate contact with the reality of the Incarnation, rendered in a symbolic style meant to invite prayer and communion, not analysis. The Carolingian north, however, increasingly favoured legibility, narrative story telling, hierarchy and natural form in service of a more didactic, rationalised approach to religion and governance. In one sense, these two ways of thinking about sacred art represent the theological divergence that was already unfolding between East and West. Rome’s was consolidating power around a Latin, imperial western Christendom on the one hand, and Constantinople maintaining the ancient mystical, liturgical cosmology on the other.
These two streams would sometimes clash and sometimes blend and finally the resulting hybrid would see unique new expressions in art, architecture and monastic life, which we’ll eventually see more fully in the Norman period, with the Italo-Byzantine and early Romanesque. But in the 9th and 10th centuries, they still stood largely apart, like two rival visions of what Christian civilisation could be. (Read more.)