Vă anunțăm cu bucurie apariția cărții The Blueness of Divine Humanism. Colors of Christ’s Garments and Their Meaning in the History of Byzantine Art, semnate de marele iconar sârb Todor Mitrović, în format electronic, în limba engleză, la Editura Bizantină.

Vă anunțăm cu bucurie apariția cărții The Blueness of Divine Humanism. Colors of Christ’s Garments and Their Meaning in the History of Byzantine Art, semnate de marele iconar sârb Todor Mitrović, în format electronic, în limba engleză, la Editura Bizantină.

• Data publicare pe website: 2024-06-28

Text știre

Cartea reprezintă o contribuție remarcabilă în domeniul iconografiei bizantine.
Pentru a descărca lucrarea și pentru a afla mai multe despre activitatea pictorului și profesorului Todor Mitrović, vizitați: Descarcă lucrarea.

Pentru mai multe detalii despre carte, vizitați site-ul Librăriei Bizantine: https://www.subscribepage.com/i9b7n6

Din cuvintele autorului:
„In the following research, I aim to show that simple descriptive coloristic facts about iconographic conventions for the depiction of Christ (and His Mother) in the Byzantine artistic context cannot be taken for granted, as axiomatic propositions without origin and meaning. On the contrary, once the axiomatic cognitive setting was questioned, the described color conventions will start presenting themselves as the very delicate pictorial and theological statements of post-iconoclastic Byzantine art, developed through minute iconographic research and infused with multiple historically contextualized semantic layers. Moreover, the blue himation of Christ, as His most conspicuous and most important garment, is going to present itself as a pictorial entity with highly polysemic symbolic charge, incomparable by its richness and semantic density with any other pictorial/symbolic device throughout the entire history of European plastic arts. Better understanding of this important aspect of Byzantine imagery will not only improve our knowledge on blue color itself, but may also radically restructure our knowledge about the way Christ was dwelling in the focal point of the entire Byzantine pictorial system.

What primarily subverts any kind of axiomatic approach to this subject is the fact that at the very beginning of Byzantine art, color codification was essentially different: Christ was, as a rule, dressed entirely in purple, entirely in gold – or in the combination of the two – with the colors of his garments conveying the strictly imperial spectrum of meaning. Moreover, if we examine the depictions of his figure in different iconographic or programmatic contexts, distinctive of this early developmental phase, it is the color(s) and not the form of his garment – nor any other pictorial aspect of his figure – that represents the only permanent semantic connection with the traditionally imperial symbolic networks. In the post-iconoclastic period, the color of Christ’s himation gradually changed, representing an obvious tendency towards radical change in correlation between his image and the imperial spectrum of meaning. Unless He was represented in His brilliant, enlightened white (or golden) garments in theophanic scenes, such as the Transfiguration and the Ascension, Christ was, after the tenth century – almost invariably – clad in himation colored in blue. During the centuries that followed, the semantic change generated by the color change was going to become so radical that the idea of the exclusivity (of the sovereign) was to be subverted by its theological opposite. The new set of colors of Christ’s garments would not be the sign of his uplifted, exclusive social status, but the sign of his closeness to the world of humans. Even more peculiarly, although the presence of the precious lapis lazuli evidently added specific exclusive heavenly prerogatives to the new color, this kind of preciousness will never become the designator of Christ’s exclusive status, the way it happened with purple. On the contrary, the artistic phenomena researched in this book will demonstrate that this new kind of heavenly preciousness could belong to (literally) any person depicted on Byzantine images – regardless of his/her status within the wider theological/ecclesiastical framework. In poetic terms, the uplifting of humanity to heavens was followed by down-lifting of heavens to the earth. Or, in theological and political terms, what once was the ultimate designator of Christ’s elevation and distance from the world of ordinary humans – the colors of his garments – conversely becomes the designator of his deepest proximity to this world.” (Introduction, pp. 8-9)