A little over a year ago I happened to be in Athens and found myself with several hours to spare on the last morning of my stay, a Sunday. A visit to the city's renowned Byzantine Museum seemed appropriate. A remodelled neo-classical mansion, built in 1848, the museum is beautifully located in a recessed courtyard, close to the parliament building. It contains a vast, incomparable collection of Byzantine art, extending from the fourth to the 19th century and including, remarkably, reconstructions of no less than three churches.
From the moment you cross the inner courtyard and enter the museum proper, you are bombarded with a dense mass of religious material: sculptures, mosaics, wall-paintings, icons, illuminated manuscripts, vestments, jewellery and sacred objects. Despite the huge time range encompassed by this collection, there is a staggering unanimity of means and ends. Of course there are some stylistic developments and variations, and different levels of skill are evident, but overall your senses are relentlessly bludgeoned with an unvarying scriptural message.
Nor was it just a case of encountering it all en masse. Byzantine art is often described as an art of decorated surfaces, not predominantly sculptural in the way that Romanesque art clearly is. But it is certainly sculptural within a wider definition of the term, with its enveloping environmental presence. Byzantine churches were designed to create an overwhelming impression.
This is underlined by the stylistic severity of Byzantine iconography, and its inexorable repetition. As one standard textbook description of San Vitale in Ravenna puts it "Images and symbols covering the entire sanctuary express the single idea of man's redemption by Christ and the re-enactment of it in the Eucharist." The harsh, insistent angularity of sacred images is directed towards the forceful expression of an idea, not towards describing the world. Their stark clarity reflects a need to communicate with an illiterate congregation. Symbol takes precedence over object.
It was enough to give pause even to an imagination accustomed to the overkill of 20th-century consumer culture. After a while it all seemed intolerably stifling, claustrophobic and alien. In fact the experience underlined for me, in a way that no art history book ever had, just how alien a world it was, and just how dramatic was the revolution in Italian painting that changed the course of Western art history. For these people, you realised, Christianity was their one chance, their only hope, their refuge and consolation. It was a bright light in a very dark world.
This state of affairs was brilliantly dramatised by the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. The Byzantine tradition flourished in 14th-century Russia under the direction of Theophanes the Greek. It produced one great artistic personality, the icon painter Andrei Rublev, about whom little is known. Tarkovsky's imaginative biography of Rublev has him forsake the glorification of God in the face of the unrelieved horror and cruelty of the world. He eventually comes to realise that it is precisely because of the horror and cruelty that he must use his talent. But Rublev's artistic achievement was to soften and humanise the rigid formalism of Theophanes, and there is an unmistakably humanist message in Tarkovsky's film.
It was Byzantine artists who, under strict scriptural guidance, devised the Christian iconography that is still familiar to us today. The visual accounts of Christ's life, death and resurrection which have formed an apparently inexhaustible store of material for artists throughout most of the last millennium, have their roots in the previous millennium, beginning several centuries after the death of Christ. Beyond the immediate confines of Byzantine tradition, the iconography did not remain fixed. It was embellished, extended and altered in line with the prevailing cultural climate and liturgical trends.
While the Last Supper, for example, first appears as a subject in 6th-century Byzantine mosaics, it became a thematic fixture in Western art and is still widely used and referred to. But initial versions depicted the apostles reclining at their meal, in line with Roman custom. By the time Leonardo produced his definitive treatment at the close of the 15th century, they are seated at table and the focus is less the celebration of a sacrament than the human drama of valediction and betrayal.
The Passion cycle was popularised as a subject in the 13th century by the Franciscans and Dominicans, when they used it to decorate their churches and monasteries. It became a staple of church furnishing right up to the present and inspired some of the great masterpieces of Western painting, as well as imponderable quantities of indifferent, formulaic ecclesiastical decoration. The same holds true of images of the Sacred Heart, which used to be a fixture in most Irish Catholic homes. It became an object of popular veneration only in the 17th century, and was adopted by the Jesuits as their emblem. The initials IHS began life in Byzantine art as an abbreviation of the Greek form of the name Jesus but, misinterpreted, have acquired several other meanings since.
The Nativity, briefly described by just two of the evangelists, was variously elaborated by successive commentators, including St Bridget of Sweden who, visiting Bethlehem in the 14th century, had a vision of the Virgin giving birth. Byzantine artists conscientiously provided two midwives, one of whom attracted divine wrath by doubting Mary's virginity. The standard Christmas card and crib account is, inevitably, a selective compendium drawn from several sources, some of them undoubtedly apocryphal. The Virgin and Child, a motif that had its origins in Byzantine art, became a standard theme, secularised as mother and child. Altarpieces, which began to appear in the latter half of the 13th century, came about because of a change in liturgical practice: the priest switched from the back to the front of the altar, and the congregation needed a focus beyond him.
When artists were forced to turn to secular subjects during the iconoclastic ban on depictions of divinity in the Byzantine church, the effect was in a sense to prefigure the Renaissance's slow dethronement of a divine Christ. By the time artists again turned to religious figuration, during a period that saw the dawn of the second millennium, the influence of Hellenic classicism had, to a certain extent, softened the doctrinaire severity of iconographic formula.
Followed to its logical conclusion, this development towards an increasing level of naturalism leads eventually to the humanisation of the figure of Christ that we begin to see in Italian and North European painting from the latter half of the 13th century. The severe, other-worldly divinity of his image in Byzantine art gives way to a vulnerable, suffering, human figure. Now, with all of art history instantaneously available to us, such a shift may seem like a matter of stylistic emphasis, but it was more significant than that. The excitement of the paintings of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Piero Della Francesca and their peers is that we can actually see a new pictorial universe open up before our eyes.
The Christian idea that shines with such blinding intensity from Byzantine art is undimmed in Romanesque and Gothic Europe. It is the spiritual centre of gravity around which whole societies cohere. Even architectural technology was driven by religious projects. The Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals are, even by today's standards, immense organisational and aesthetic achievements, and the Church was uniquely equipped with the global administrative structure to build them.
In Gothic art, realistic physicality is employed to emphasise the extremity of Christ's suffering, often in lurid detail, a North European trend that culminates in one of the more extreme representations in European art, Matthais Grunewalds's Isenheim altarpiece painted in 1515, which depicts, with fetishistic intensity, the crucified Christ's scarred flesh, sagging and pitted with thorns and countless abrasions. It is still a startling, disturbing image to encounter at first hand in its present home, Colmar.
The contrast between Grunewald's dark forensic vision and the beatific light of Raphael's Crucifixion with Saints, painted a decade earlier, and which now hangs in London's National Gallery, is extraordinary. Against a crisp blue sky, while realistically rendered as a figure who has suffered, Christ looks as if he is serenely asleep, even though blood flows from his wounds - an angel collects the fluid from his breast in goblets. At the foot of the cross, the symmetrically placed mourners are gracefully posed. The limpidly clear image radiates calmness.
In his recent book, John Drury, the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, cites Raphael's painting to illustrate the difficulties a contemporary audience faces in looking at art made at a time "when western civilisation was Christian". Yet on the whole he overstates those difficulties. His suggestion that we might have a problem with someone making a beautiful painting about an act of apparent barbarity raises an issue much wider than our lack of familiarity with, or inability to interpret Christian iconography.
From the point of view of the institutional Christian religions, the problem is not primarily one of interpretation, but of status. In the 20th century Christian symbolism has often been used provocatively, as something to react against. Christian icons are part of the cultural landscape, to the extent that Madonna can build an image by playing ambiguously with the stereotype, or Michael Jackson can equate himself with Christ. Equally, in the sphere of fine art, Sam Taylor Wood staged a photographic version of The Last Supper featuring a cast of fashionable London friends with a female Christ (a recurrent motif in contemporary art) who, just in case we don't get the point, adopts a cruciform pose. Such acts of appropriation indicate that the sacredness and exclusivity of Christian icons have been diminished, but not our broad familiarity with them.
The issue of beauty in cruelty is more complex. In contrast to the gloomy expressionism of Grunewald's image, Raphael's lightness relates to the intrinsic humanism of the Renaissance. About 25 years before Raphael painted his crucifixion, in Florence, Marsilio Ficino, an other-worldly, intensely religious Greek scholar enlisted by Cosimo di Medici to translate the writings of Plato, produced an influential synthesis of Platonic and Christian ideas that in many respects summarises Renaissance humanism - which, as an intellectual project, remained compromised by such religious integration.
