Last light. Golden Horn, oil, 2009

27 x 39in 68 x 97cm

Pilgrim route; ruined church, Lycia, oil, 2009

40 x 32in 100 x 80cm

The Chapel of Geogios, oil, 2009

11 x 15in 27 x 38cm

Byzantine Venice, oil, 2008

54 x 54in 137 x 137cm

That gong-tormented Sea:Contemporary painters pursue the idea and reality of Byzantium

Dominating two seas at the strategic crossroads of Europe and Asia, the old Greek colony of Byzantium was chosen by the Emperor Constantine to replace Rome in 324AD as the new capital of his empire. For some eleven hundred years Constantinople flourished as the nerve centre and creative fulcrum for the eastern Christian Empire of Byzantium. Known to the Greek-speaking world simply as  ‘ή πόλις’ – ‘the capital’ –  this city, as vast, polyglot and tolerant of minorities as only perhaps London has been historically, administered an empire encompassing Carthage, Ravenna, Syracuse, Antioch and Trebizond.

More than the sum of its territories, as a unique fusion of elements from Greek, Roman and oriental culture, Byzantium has become synonymous with a frame of mind. For some it is a byword for the exotic and mysterious, the nexus of devious diplomacy backed up by occasional violence. The Christian knights who divided its spoils (the lion’s share going to Venice) after sacking Constantinople on the Fourth Crusade were in no doubt that this was the richest city on earth. Some of its splendour is still reflected in the matchless mosaics of Ravenna. It is this spiritual energy coursing through Byzantine culture which, functioning largely in harmony with an immensely sophisticated civil administration underpinned the Orthodox Church in holding together the vast fabric of the Empire; some elements, indeed, of the panoply and ritual of the Byzantine imperial court are preserved still in the rites and vestments of the Orthodox Church. Without the bulwark provided by the armies and missionaries of the Byzantine Empire, blocking successive invaders from the east as its scale expanded and contracted with changing fortunes, Europe would not exist as we know it. The values and achievements of the classical world would have disappeared and the Italian Renaissance would never have happened.  

In spring 2007 some twenty-five contemporary artists were invited by the Gallery to immerse themselves in the phenomenon of Byzantium in whatever way appealed to them, discovering in themselves a response to the character, the aesthetics, the historical setting of this culture with its unique blending of Eastern and Western elements.  

For her first showing in the Gallery HR Bell lived for five months in Istanbul, mostly in the Kurtulus district, the city’s most ethnically diverse area. Her response is an exercise in translating the city’s life and pulse as it seethed around her into vivid oil studies.

Julian Bell has taken imaginative flight, with a corresponding play on perspective, from an episode in Byzantine history concerning the retreat of an army through Bithynia.

Hugh Buchanan celebrated a Byzantine renaissance in St Petersburg’s Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood.

Claudia Clare discovered by a Byzantine bathhouse broken pots decorated with an intriguing narrative of deceit, debauchery and fine wine, indicative of a moral tale communicated through the symbolism of the pomegranate in relation to marriage and virginity.

Genevieve Dael has deployed shafts of light filtering through high windows to illuminate the darkness of the immense interior of Hagia Sophia.

John Fisher found subjects at the two extremes of Byzantium’s long chronology – in the Basilica of  S. Vitale in Ravenna, where “amber light, filtering through translucent stone changes the hard Italian sunlight into a golden other world” and among the palaces and churches of the walled city of Mystras in the southern Peloponnese, the site of the last flowering of Byzantine culture and the germ of the Renaissance.

Ramsay Gibb became as familiar as a native with the ferry circuits of the Bosphorus, catching the city’s changing profile at different times of the day.

Working in a subtle, monochrome pen and wash, François Houtin has created a characteristically suggestive architectural capriccio on a Byzantine theme. 

Steven Hubbard has responded in a gently humorous vein, deploying all his exceptional skills in marquetry, to the imagery of icons and portraits in mosaic, putting a new slant on those faces which can express two different moods at once, suggesting surprise alongside gravity and inwardness.

Philip Hughes was intrigued by the great defensive walls of Constantinople and the rock-hewn churches of Cappadocia in their almost surreal landscape.

Working in ceramic in her fanciful, ‘ludic’ manner Psiche Hughes found inspiration in the shape of a perfume brazier from Constantinople to fashion a lidded pot in the form of a Byzantine octagonal church.

Gordon Joy welcomed an opportunity to realise the ambition of half a lifetime in painting the ‘monasteries of the air’ in Meteora, Thessaly, perched on their pinnacles of rock for long accessible only by basket.   

At Mystras Barry Kirk was drawn chiefly to the Pantanassa monastery and the Peribleptos church where frescoes of mountains in the best stylised late Byzantine manner confront almost directly the precipices of the Taygettus range looming over the ancient city.

Gerald Mynott needed no excuse to focus on Byzantine elements in the architecture of Venice. 

Heather Pocock sought out classical expressions of Byzantine art in Istanbul (the Chora Church), Sinai (the monastery of St. Catherine) and in both the Greek and Turkish sectors of Cyprus, finding in the Troodos mountains small, densely painted churches still in use after fourteen hundred years.

Lucy Raverat, always so strong on texture has painted dramatic interpretations of a Byzantine riverside community along with giant angels in a setting both geological and heavenly.

Malte Sartorius returned to Venice, so subtly caught in its distilled essence in his large etching sequence, to focus rather differently on aspects of the greatest Byzantine structure in the west, the Basilica of St. Mark’s.

In Man of Sorrows, painted partly in grisaille and partly in polychrome, Alain Senezhas translated a classically flat Byzantine perception into a Western idiom, infusing a cool archetype with startling tenderness and humanity.

Wendy Sutherland has taken the path of philosophy and symbolism in approaching Byzantium, creating large-scale canvases exploring links between the Babylonian myth of the Dry Tree and the Iron Tree of Byzantium.

Paul Vanstone, sculptor in onyx and marble has contributed a monumental piece carved in homage to a favourite work from the period.

Julian Villarubi stayed as a pilgrim in two of the monasteries of Mount Athos, Vatopaidi and Dionysiou, sharing the daily routines of its working community.

Jon Wealleans brought his fascination with surface detail and strong colour to bear on certain Byzantine buildings observed in Istanbul.

Anna Wimbledon has interpreted scenes from the life of the notorious Theodora, Empress to Justinian, whose career and character were analysed so uncompromisingly in the Secret History of  Procopius.

Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

From Byzantium by WB Yeats, 1930