The Blueness of Divine Humanism: Colors of Christ’s Garments and Their Meaning in the History of Byzantine Art (original) (raw)

2024, Editura Bizantina, Bucharest

'The Blueness of Divine Humanism' deals with the specific coloristic aspects of Christ’s image in Byzantine art. The key historical change discovered, analyzed and interpreted in this book is the change of the color of Christ’s most conspicuous and most important garment from purple to blue, which happened in centuries following the iconoclastic crisis. Thus, the study reveals how one specific color, irrelevant in early Byzantine cultural context, gradually climbs up on the semantic value scale, up to the point of becoming the unquestionable designator of Christ’s visual presence in post-iconoclastic art and liturgy. Careful contextualization of this specific pictorial invention shows the enormous richness of its semantic potential and, consequently, demonstrates that the image of Byzantine Christ changed in the most subtle yet the most radical ways throughout the Middle Ages. Namely, the very color change radically subverts the earlier conventions of Byzantine artistic language, up to the point of becoming a specific designator of Christ’s kenotic un-exclusivity on the symbolic horizon of a medieval viewer. His image changes from the powerful sovereign dressed entirely-in-purple (or gold), in Early Byzantine art, to become the power-emptied High Priest, who is dressed in garment colored by innovative blue color, which is, at the same time, appropriate to be worn in heavens and by any human being on earth. Thus, this research shows how the relations between imperial and ecclesiastical ideologies gradually changed, not only in the high level theological or courtly realms, but also in the domain of the most popular visual culture at the time. Finally, as those meaningful changes directly affected the image of Christ, which was the cornerstone of the entire Byzantine representational system, the semantic capacities of the mysterious blueness of his robe were to increase beyond political symbolism, and enrich to the point of becoming – as this study will argue – one of the most profound pictorial inventions of European (medieval) culture.