THE EYE IS A PART OF THE MIND
203
We can now modify Constable's dictum and propose that
art
seeks
the pure apprehension of natural fact wherever natural fact,
as registered by the senses, is regarded as meaningful reality. Where
it is not so interpreted we shall find some form of anti-humanist
distortion, of hieratic stylization or abstraction. But-and this is
crucial-such abstraction will continue to apprehend and to express
reality.
Though it rejects the intimations of mere sense perception,
it does not thereby cease to be representational. Only the matter
that now calls for representation is drawn from a new order of
reality.
Let us list briefly some of the formal features governing Early
Christian and Byzantine
art.
Comparing it to the preceding style of
disenchanted Hellenism, we are struck by a rigid frontality in the
disposition of figures, by a minimu!D of variation in gesture, and
the replacement of individual likeness by canonic type. We note that
movement is arrested, that the natural bulk of things is flattened
and
all
forms are gathered in a single plane; distance is eliminated
in favor of ideal space, purple or gold; color becomes pure, unmod–
ulated, and the shadow- that negating spirit who haunts only the
art
of the West-vanishes in the diffusion of an unremitting light.
These devices sound, as indeed they look, other-worldly. Yet we
can say without paradox that their employment proves how deeply
involved was the
art
of Byzantium, and of the Western Dark and
Middle Ages, in the effort at truthful representation. This is readily
verified by reference to Neo-Platonist aesthetics.
The most valuable source here is Plotinus, whose thought, by
way of Dionysius and Augustine, shaped the spirituality of the first
Christian millennium. What, asks Plotinus, speaking of the plastic
arts,
are true distance and true size? And his answer is a philosophic
premonition of the Byzantine manner.
5
If
we see two men, the one
close by, the other far away, the latter will appear ridiculously
dwarfed, and the interval between the two will seem absurdly
shrunken. A given distance, therefore, is so many measures of falsi–
fication. Since deep space is the occasion of delusion, true distance
can exist only within the nearest facing plane; true size is the di–
mension of each form within that plane.
The argument may be extended to true color.
If
the red of a
red object fades in distance, this effaced, degraded color is not "true."
