How the Turks who defeated Byzantium staged a European Renaissance

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Renaissance painting has become a benchmark for many generations of artists to come. Many are sure that for this it was enough to use a device with lenses, which would make it possible to accurately sketch the lines. However, Renaissance painting is more than the realism of the line drawing. There must be another factor, and many are convinced that the Renaissance was actually created not by Europeans, but by the Byzantines.

The traditions of antiquity were not really interrupted

The decline of realistic painting and sculpture in Europe is associated with the fall of Rome and the disappearance of ancient schools and traditions. Indeed, sculptural and painted portraits of antiquity amaze with their realism and, in the case of painting, work with color, and the European Middle Ages are not at all happy: flat figures, distorted perspectives and proportions, grotesque figurines. "The traditions of antiquity were lost forever, I had to learn everything anew", this is how these changes are usually commented on.

In fact, the traditions of antiquity were never completely interrupted, because only the western part of the Roman Empire perished. The Eastern, known to us as Byzantium, experienced its end of the world in the seventh century - with crop failures, cold weather, plague and the invasion of barbarians - but still retained a sufficient number of masters who could teach further.

With the spread of Christianity, stylization came into fashion, but the traditions and techniques of realistic painting and sculpture did not disappear completely. Just the custom of studying in Byzantium, just as in the nineteenth century half of Europe went to study painting in Paris and Italy, European artists did not have: in the first place, such a journey would be very dangerous. It would be more accurate to say that Europe was cut off from the traditional ancient realistic school, and not that the tradition was suppressed and perished.

Revival began in Italy in the fourteenth century

Of course, this period is called "proto-Renaissance", but it is from here that you can begin the countdown of the return of the ancient tradition to Europe. We do not yet see the realism that will be achieved already in the fifteenth century, but we see images of the Mother of God and the saints, which seem very familiar and similar to medieval Russians. The thing is that they are painted in the Byzantine style. Later, in the fifteenth century, the "real Renaissance" began, during which realism and techniques, so similar to the ancient ones, began to spread from Italy throughout Europe. These techniques are so subtle and numerous that they cannot be explained by the invention of the lens alone (although the lens was no doubt used).

But what happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and why did Italy turn out to be so special? In Soviet magazines, one could read the popular theory that in Italy the most ancient masterpieces were preserved, and artists began to orient themselves on them - before that, everything antique was rejected as pagan. But the last statement is not true. The Middle Ages are full of references to ancient texts and mythology, to be familiar with them meant to be a cultured person. This means that the antique was not ignored, it was something else.

If we look a little more globally at the processes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we will see the gradual death of Byzantium, where the final point in its history was put by Sultan Mehmed II, who seized Constantinople in 1453. Obviously, in all the last years of the empire's life, its masters were quietly looking for opportunities to live in other Christian countries, and after the fall of the empire, the outflow should have become completely massive (remember that this is how the gypsies appeared in Europe).

One of the most established ties in Byzantium was the sea connection with Italy, in Byzantium there were Italian settlements, and those of the educated Byzantines who did not know Italian, at least learned Latin - the universal language of international communication in the Middle Ages. Most likely, a critical mass of qualified refugees from Byzantium formed in Italy. More precisely, this is a fact known to history, but it is more often associated with science than with art - however, not only scientists fled from the collapsed empire. By the way, it was scientists who could bring with them a device with a lens, which made life easier for painters - optics in Byzantium was at its best. In other words, European culture and science were raised by refugees, and from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, due to the ignorance of interpreters, it became commonplace to declare the Renaissance just a miracle of a sharp rise in human thought and the human spirit.

There were so many refugees that the Pope had to establish a College for their affairs

The exodus of Greek-speaking Christians from the former Byzantium continued even after its fall, and was so massive that in the end Pope Gregory XIII founded a separate College, which was engaged in accepting new refugees and integrating them, more precisely, retraining them to Catholicism. For this, many young people studied theology, in order to then retrain thousands of their fellow tribesmen living in Italy from the Greek rite to Latin (in Venice alone, by the end of the fifteenth century, there were five thousand Byzantines).

All these refugees brought with them the school and academic programs of Byzantium, which were much more advanced than in Europe, but, most importantly, the Byzantine academic and pedagogical approaches that made it possible to advance science in a new place further and effectively train new masters using techniques more varied than "repeat after me".

Among the artists of Byzantine culture, many were great masters and became famous as painters of new countries of residence. This is the Spanish master El Greco, whose real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos and who began by moving to Italy, the Venetian Marco Baziti, who was born into a refugee family and educated in his circle, the Venetian Antonio Vasilakki (Antonios Vasilakis), who was born on the Greek island of Milos. The number of smaller artists numbered in the hundreds, and this mass could not but influence the general trends in painting. Taking into account the fact that the names were trying to "Italianize", it is simply impossible to calculate the origin of other ordinary artists.

It turns out that the painting of the Renaissance was not a discovery "from scratch", it continued many centuries of research and development. It is not surprising that Fayum portraits and ancient Roman paintings are so similar to the paintings of the last centuries. They belong to the same tradition, which in fact has not been interrupted. And if we consider that all subsequent schools of painting, up to the end of the nineteenth century, were rooted in the Italian Renaissance, we can say that European art does not just stand on ancient traditions - it grew out of ancient art and continued it, it was the same the school itself.

Masters made students draw from life

Many drawings of the Renaissance period have survived, which cannot be explained by lenses. These are sketches from nature, with varying degrees of success and complexity, from angles that show that the artist tried to study and understand how the human body and its parts will look in different circumstances and how to convey it as realistically as possible. Most likely, the Byzantines also brought learning through sketches - anatomy in the late antique tradition was given a lot of attention, which is clearly seen from the sculptures.

This does not mean that the Europeans did not invest in the Renaissance

A very important factor for the development of that Renaissance painting, which we now admire, was the development of oil painting. Although the paints themselves have been known to mankind for a long time, to the level that was required to create the masterpieces known to us, the technique was raised by the Dutchman Jan van Eyck. Some techniques were also developed by the Dutch and Germans and organically intertwined with those that the Byzantines brought with them, forcing them to change their school of painting to this technique. In addition, the Byzantines most likely had little impact on the development of the secular literature that the Renaissance is proud of. But the masterpieces of ancient Greek authors, finally translated into Latin, influenced the growth of humanism and philosophy.

If you are not yet familiar with lens theory, then you should do this: The secret of "realistic" Renaissance painting.