The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (36 page)

What might have been the future of Western art if the Iconoclasts had prevailed and spread their orthodoxy through the Church of Rome? How different might Western Christendom have been without the collaboration of painters and sculptors! All the great historic religions, except Judaism and Islam, have enlisted the image makers—painters and sculptors. Even during their brief decades of power, the Iconoclasts did affect the arts of Byzantium. When Christian artists were forced into secular channels, they, like the Muslims, turned to geometric and floral motifs, and produced a brief but brilliant classical revival.

Because John of Damascus and his theological cohorts prevailed with their theological subtlety and commonsense psychology, the Christian Church remained free to enlist the representational arts. Western artists would benefit from the patronage, the inspiration, and the enthusiasm of faithful Christians. Whether the West in the long run could have been as rich in art had the artists been forced into secular channels, we will never know. The examples of Islam and of militantly secular totalitarian states in the twentieth century remind us of how much might have been lost. The triumph of John of Damascus produced more than a treasury of beautiful objects. For during worship, as Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople (806–15) explained, icons could convey “theological knowledge” of a divine reality that transcended all being. “They are expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the ineffability of a mystery that transcends being. Without ceasing and without silence, they praise the goodness of God, in that venerable and thrice-illumined melody of theology.”

In the Christian East, sacred images played a distinctive role in this melody. The religious art of the medieval West would be mainly didactic or decorative. But in Byzantium images became icons, vital elements in devotion and architecture. Every image of Christ became somehow a confession of faith in the Incarnation. So important did images become that the historic return of icons to the churches was, and still is, commemorated by one of the main feasts of the Eastern Church. This is the Feast of Orthodoxy on the first Sunday of Lent, “the Sunday of Orthodoxy.” Empress Theodora managed finally to end the controversy in 843 after the death of her iconoclastic husband, Emperor Theophilus. Ironically, political and theological turmoil forced her to end her days in a convent in 858. The hymn for the Sunday of Orthodoxy speaks to the Virgin Mary:

Western Christianity was not destined to suffer another iconoclastic trauma till the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

But even after the defeat of the Iconoclasts, representational art was never quite liberated in the East. It became the art of the icon, which survived for centuries in Byzantium, Russia, and in between. The incorporation of images into theology gave the art of the icon the rigidity of theology. In Byzantium the icons did not merely represent the Incarnation, they somehow expressed it and were part of its history. There, when architects and artists returned with enthusiasm to sacred images, they never ceased to be haunted by suspicions of “graven images.” Sculpture in the round was not tolerated, and even sculpture in relief was rare. A new Eastern visual liturgy developed, a holy scripture of images, keyed to the liturgical feasts, and placed in a canonical order. Icons produced iconography, a new element in Byzantine Church architecture.

The iconostasis, a solid screen of wood, stone, or metal to separate the sanctuary from the nave in the Eastern Christian churches, became the prescribed way of displaying icons. The top row on the iconostasis showed the biblical prophets; the second row, the events and miracles in the life of Christ on earth; the third row, the deesis, a central icon of Christ enthroned in the center, with icons of the Mother and Child (the Incarnation) on the left and Christ the Pantocrator (Christ in majesty) on the right. The bottom row commonly showed icons of special local interest. Only minor variations appeared over the centuries, with an additional row of icons sometimes added above or below. The familiar order survived into the nineteenth century, easing the grasp of the illiterate viewer on the Great Truths of the Church in any church that he happened to enter. The survival of the icon bore witness to the changeless life and unchanging faith of a mass of Eastern believers. It became, too, symbolically a part of the screen that shielded the mystery of the Eucharist from the worshiper.

Few sacred images survived the onslaughts of the Iconoclasts. After their defeat, brilliant artists expert in paint and mosaic were still wary of deviating from the expected image. Even the greatest of icon painters in the fifteenth century, Andrei Rublev, shows little of the freedom of his great Christian contemporaries in the West. A surprising homogeneity of design and restraint pervades the icons over many centuries and over a vast continent. When art became one with theology the artist-creator became an acolyte of the archetype, fearing to offer his private vision.

W
HILE
Christian theology was enlisted to give artists a divinely appointed task, in Islam religion remained the inhibitor of the arts. “The angels,” said the Prophet Mohammed, “will not enter a house in which there is a picture or a dog.” Those most severely punished on the Day of Judgment—along with the murderer of a prophet and the seducer from true knowledge—will be “the maker of images or pictures.” Since the Koran did not explicitly forbid images, the notorious Muslim hostility to images came from the Traditions (Hadiths) of the Prophet.

Pious Muslims had long since made the destruction of images a religious duty. Many a Muslim Savonarola salved his conscience and lit his way to heaven with his own “bonfire of the vanities.” When the Umayyad caliph Uman ibn Abd al-Aziz (717–20) found a picture in his bathroom he had it rubbed out and sought out the painter “to have him well beaten.” Sultan Firuz Shan Tughluk (c.1308–1388; reigned 1351–88) left his mark in Muslim history not only by building his own capital city, Firuzabad, and by constructing mosques, hospitals, baths, bridges, and the Jumna Canal, but by mutilating and destroying innumerable works of art. His autobiography boasted that he had erased all pictures from the doors or walls of his palaces and “under the divine guidance and favor” had even removed the figured ornaments from saddles and bridles, from goblets and cups, dishes and ewers, from tents, curtains, and chairs. Sometimes pious Muslims economized efforts by merely scratching or smearing the faces of images they happened on.

Yet Islam, unlike Christianity, was ill organized to mount a doctrinal crusade against images. The unstinting commitment to the Koran, to be supplemented only by the Traditions of the Prophet, discouraged any elaborate doctrine of the arts. There was no priestly hierarchy to proclaim an authorized dogma, nor were there illustrated versions of the Koran. The Christian attitudes for and against images, as we have seen, can be traced
to Councils of the Church or revered Church Fathers. The Koran, itself a vehicle of the beauty and eloquence of Arabic, helped diffuse that language, played a role comparable to that of the Homeric epics or the Judeo-Christian Bible, and provided an increasing resource for a rich literature. Calligraphy—the art of writing—glorified the Koran with unexcelled flamboyance and elegance.

But the Muslim passion against images was a spontaneous by-product of Muslim history and society. Although there was never any specifically religious art in Islam, the Muslim-Arab world proved fertile of other kinds of art. The story of the arts in Islam dramatizes the struggle of Islam to establish its uniqueness, reveals its problems in a world of Unbelievers, and exposes its hopeless struggle to affirm God the Creator by denying Man the Creator.

The scriptural basis for iconoclasm, as we have seen, was Moses’ Second Commandment. The personal influence of the many Jewish converts to Islam reinforced this traditional Semitic fear of human representation in sculpture and painting. Then there was the earnestness of the Prophet and his disciples to distinguish their faith from the pagan religions that it displaced. The idols in the Kaabah in Mecca in pre-Islamic times were the special target of their fears. Yet in the earlier Arab world there had been no developed tradition of figural art which they would have to deny. So there was no need for a Muslim iconoclasm. Islam, by affirming the “stark monotheism” of a God who had a monopoly on creation, abhorred the temptations to compete with God by man’s pretended acts of creation.

At the Day of Judgment when God calls upon the painter to breathe life into the forms he has made, the painter’s mockery of God’s acts of “creation” is exposed. Then he is sentenced to the worst punishments of hell. The artist by pretending to be a creator has denied the uniqueness of God and commits blasphemy with every stroke of his brush. According to the Koran, God alone is the “fashioner” (
musawwir
).

Muslim man (and surely Muslim woman!) was not made in God’s image, but was only an image made by the unique Image Maker.

The career of the arts in Islam produced a grand irony that would have dismayed or outraged the Prophet. For Muslim history proved the powerlessness
of Allah to monopolize the powers of creation, and confirmed the irrepressible human need to create, which was eventually recognized, encouraged, and rewarded by the Heroes of Islam themselves. The mosque, the building and the institution, made claims peculiar to Islam, and was shaped accordingly. But there was no distinctively Muslim tradition of religious painting, and no religious sculpture of living figures. In Christian countries the flourishing of painting and sculpture is a measure of the vitality and reach of Christian faith. In Islam, on the contrary, the flourishing of representational art measures the willingness of Muslim leaders to defy the tenets of their faith. Muslim painting, which has charmed the non-Muslim world and commands extravagant prices from modern collectors, remains a monument to artists undaunted by threats of hellfire and damnation.

Some say that the “orthodox” Muslim leaders’ disregard of the religious prohibition against representing living figures is no more remarkable than the proverbial violation of their own religious tenets by Jews and Christians and the “faithful” of other faiths. Nor, they say, was it more flagrant than prominent Muslims’ defiance of the prohibition of wine, of music, of gaming, of the building of stately tombs, or the making of eunuchs. The celebrated caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809), the conquering hero of
The Arabian Nights
, was a habitual drinker, though usually discreetly and in private. Musicians, singers, dancing girls, and eunuchs were familiar features of Muslim courts. But paintings themselves became part of the record of history, and despite all efforts to conceal or erase the sins of the painter, they would survive to our own time. The works of Muslim artists and of others inspired by Islam had the delicious taste of forbidden fruit.

At first leaders of Islam who dared violate their religious tradition with representational art tried to keep their vices private. Of the works of early Muslim artists only random fragments have been discovered. At the height of the empire of the Caliphate (from Arab “caliph” for “successor”) in the two centuries after the Prophet’s death, the caliphs and their agents were already defying the prohibition. The very first caliphs, the Umayyads (661–750), were flagrant in disobedience. For their palaces they commissioned frescoes of lions, dogs, and butting rams, and on pilgrimages to Mecca would decorate their tents with similar figures brocaded in gold. Their successors, the Abbasid caliphs (750–1258) cultivated a reputation for strict piety, but their violations were even more conspicuous. Mansur (712?–775; reigned 754–75), who built a new capital at Baghdad and founded a splendid city there, adorned the top of the dome of his palace with the figure of a knight on horseback, who served as a weather vane and also pointed his lance in the direction from which to expect the rebel army to attack. Caliph Amin (809–13) fashioned his pleasure boats for parties on the Tigris in the
shapes of lions, eagles, and dolphins. Others showed more respect for popular prejudice by keeping their art indoors. In his Baghdad palace Caliph Muqtadir (908–932) built a work of legendary grandeur—a tree of gold and silver, with eighteen branches carrying precious stones shaped like fruit, and gold and silver birds that sang when moved by the wind. At each end of the decorative pool were the opposed figures of fifteen horsemen in elegant silks tilting their swords and lances.

By the eleventh century the Fatimid caliphs were shameless in their extravagance, vividly reported later by the Muslim historian Maqrizi (1364–1442). A ceremonial tent commissioned by Yazuri, minister of Caliph Mustansir (1035–1094), and decorated with the images of all the world’s animals, occupied 150 workmen for nine years. This same art-loving vizier became legendary for encouraging competition among his artists.

By about 1200 imaginary competitions between artists had become a favorite subject for poets. The Persian poet Nizami (c.1140–c.1202) depicted an ancient competition at the court of Alexander the Great. One spring day while Alexander was entertaining the emperor of China, the wine-filled monarchs debated the talents of East and West. After comparing the different attainments in magic and singing and lute playing, they mounted a competition to compare the skills of their painters. And so (in Thomas W. Arnold’s translation):