The issue of the struggle was not a complete victory even in Byzantium
for the partisans of image-worship. The Iconoclasts left an indelible
impress on the Christian art of the Greek Church, in so far as they put
an end to the use of graven images; for the Eastern icon is a flat
picture, less easily regarded than would be a statue as a nidus within
which a spirit can lurk. Half the realm of creative art, that of
statuary, was thus suppressed at a blow; and the other half, painting,
forfeited all the grace and freedom, all the capacity of new themes,
forms and colours, all the development which we see in the Latin Church.
The Greeks have produced no Giotto, no Fra Angelico, no Raphael. Their
artists have no choice of subjects and no initiative. Colour, dress,
attitude, grouping of figures are all dictated by traditional rules, set
out in regular manuals. God the Father may not be depicted at all--a
restriction intelligible when we remember that the image in theory is
fraught with the virtue of the archetype; but everywhere the utmost
timidity is shown. What else could an artist do but make a slavish and
exact copy of old pictures which worked miracles and perhaps had the
reputation as well of having fallen from heaven?
3. Between these extreme parties the Roman Church took the middle way of
common sense. The hair-splitting distinction of the Byzantine doctors
between veneration due to images ([Greek: proskynêsis timêtikê]), and
the adoration ([Greek: proskynêsis latreutikê]) due to God alone, was
dropped, and the utility of pictures for the illiterate emphasized.
Their use was declared to be this, that they taught the ignorant through
the eye what they should adore with the mind; they are not themselves to
be adored. Such was Gregory the Great's teaching, and such also is the
purport of the Caroline books, which embody the conclusions arrived at
by the bishops of Germany, Gaul and Aquitaine, presided over by papal
legates at the council of Frankfort in 794, and incidentally also reveal
the hatred and contempt of Charlemagne for the Byzantine empire as an
institution, and for Irene, its ruler, as a person. The theologians whom
Louis the Pious convened at Paris in 825, to answer the letter received
from the iconoclast emperor Michael Balbus, were as hostile to the
orthodox Greeks as to the image-worshippers, and did not scruple to
censure Pope Adrian for having approved of the empress Irene's attitude.
The council of Trent decided afresh in the same sense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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