Introduction

Introduction to Part 1 to Part 1 1

Introduction to Part 1
Maria Taroutina

Roger Fry first coined the term “Proto-Byzantines” in 1908 in an article describ-
ing the modernist masterpieces of Signac, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne
then on display at the International Society in London. He wrote:

[Cézanne and Gauguin] are not really Impressionists at all, they are
proto-Byzantines rather than Neo-Impressionists. They have already
attained to the contour, and assert its value with keen emphasis. They fill
the contour with willfully simplified and unmodulated masses, and rely
for their whole effect upon a well-considered co-ordination of the sim-
plest elements.1

Responding to a negative review in Burlington Magazine, Fry defended the

Post-Impressionists by arguing that their pictorially daring artworks were not
the result of an “eclectic” distortion or misunderstanding of Impressionist
painting. Rather, he thought of these works as a deliberate “recovery” of “By-
zantinism.” Relying on historical precedent, Fry articulated a cyclical, rather
than a teleological, theory of artistic development, arguing that

“Impressionism” has existed before, in the Roman art of the Empire, and
it too was followed, as I believe inevitably, by a movement similar to that
observable in the Neo-Impressionists—we may call it for convenience
Byzantinism. In the mosaics of Sta Maria Maggiore … one can see some-
thing of this transformation from Impressionism in the original work to
Byzantinism in subsequent restorations. It is probably a mistake to sup-
pose, as is usually done, that Byzantinism was due to a loss of the techni-
cal ability to be realistic, consequent upon barbarian invasions. In the
Eastern empire there was never any loss of technical skill; indeed, noth-
ing could surpass the perfections of some Byzantine craftsmanship. Byz-
antinism was the necessary outcome of Impressionism, a necessary and
inevitable reaction from it.2

1 Roger Fry, “Letter” to the Burlington Magazine, March 1908, in Christopher Reed, A Roger Fry
Reader by Roger Fry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 73.
2 Ibid.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300019_002

2 Taroutina

From an etymological perspective, “proto-Byzantine” implied that the art of

the Post-Impressionists was first and foremost “Byzantine” rather than “Im-
pressionist” in nature, which, in its turn, signaled both an aesthetic and con-
ceptual break with the naturalist tradition of representation. Fry thus recast
the most cutting-edge French avant-garde movement of the late-nineteenth
century as an essentially Byzantine revival; one that self-consciously shifted
the representational paradigm, much like Byzantine art had done centuries
before.
A similar idea was articulated two years later by the Russian artist, critic,
and art historian Alexander Benois, who described the burgeoning Russian
avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century as the “Byzantinism of
our age.”3 Benois argued that “Byzantinism” was neither an isolated nor a local-
ized trend, but signaled a widespread “turning point” in artistic culture more
broadly; and while in Russia the winds of “Byzantine” change were only begin-
ning to appear, in Europe, and especially in France, they had already reached
full force. Singling out Matisse as one of the most important pioneers of “Byz-
antinism,” Benois wrote:

Matisse develops mistakes and blunders into a system, a theory….

A return to “correct” design, to “accurate” coloration is no longer possible
for him. Any such return would be a compromise—such as those com-
promises, which often distort the art of one of the most wonderful artists
of our time, Maurice Denis.4

For Benois, “Byzantinism” represented not only a particular set of modernist

pictorial values, which he identified as a “simplified style, monumentality and
primitive decorativeness,” but also a new theory of art that firmly rejected the
slightest hints of representational illusionism as an aesthetic “compromise.”5
Despite his personal predilection for the art of Maurice Denis, Benois believed
that mere stylistic and iconographic borrowing remained only superficial “Byz-
antinism” that failed to fully embrace the multiple aesthetic and conceptual
possibilities inherent in Byzantine art. Modern “Byzantinism” was thus under-
stood both by Benois and Fry as a totalizing and definitive reconceptualization
of the appearance and function of art in modernity, one that moved beyond
reductive imitation or copying of medieval Byzantine forms.

3 Alexander Benois, “Khudozhestvennyie Pisma—Salon i shkola Baskta (Letters on Art: The

Salon and the School of Bakst),” Rech’ 117 (May, 1910):3.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
Introduction to Part 1 3

It remains unclear whether Benois and Fry employed the term “Byzantine”
simply as a convenient metaphor or historical analogy for modernism, or
whether they genuinely (mis)read Byzantine goals and aesthetics as anachro-
nistically proto-modern. In any case, their formulation of “Modernism as Byz-
antinism” set an important precedent in the understanding and reception of
contemporary modern art, and a number of other thinkers, critics, and artists
began to draw similar conceptual and aesthetic parallels. Thus, for example, in
his study On the Connections between Russian Painting, Byzantium, and the
West from the 12th through the 20th Centuries, the artist and theorist Aleksei
Grishchenko asserted that “twentieth-century Paris is strangely synonymous
with medieval Moscow.”6 Comparing a medieval icon to the most recent work
of Picasso, Grishchenko underscored what he saw as meaningful formal reso-
nances between the two, highlighting their similarities rather than their differ-
ences:

… it is wonderful [to see] that in several Moscow icons … the coloristic

problem of combining three different tonalities is masterfully solved, [a
problem] only recently explored by Picasso in his famous portrait Woman
with a Fan from S.I. Shchukin’s collection.7

The avant-garde artist, Natalia Goncharova, likewise observed that

If one looks closely at the work of contemporary French artists, begin-

ning with Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and at ancient Russian paint-
ing—if one thinks hard—it becomes clear that the aims of one and the
other coincide. This is the only true and constant aim in art.8

Benois developed this idea further in his 1913 article “Icons and the New Art,”
where he claimed that Byzantine and modern art not only had analogous aims
aesthetically and conceptually, but were also mutually generative, wherein ex-
posure to one facilitated the understanding and appreciation of the other:

6 Aleksei Grishchenko, O Sviaziakh russkoi zhivopisi s Vizantiei i Zapadom XIII–XX vv (Moscow:

Izd. A. Grishchenko, 1913), 26.
7 Ibid., 17.
8 Natalia Goncharova, “Press Statement, 24 December 1911,” in Jane Sharp, Russian Modernism
Between East and West: Natalia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde (Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 271.
4 Taroutina

Not only does the fourteenth-century Nicholas the Miracle Worker or

Nativity of the Mother of God help us to understand Matisse, Picasso, Le
Fauconnier or Goncharova; but through Matisse, Picasso, Le Fauconnier
or Goncharova, we feel the great beauty of these Byzantine pictures
much better, the fact that they have youth, power and animation.9

Two years later, he would famously state that one of the most celebrated mas-
terpieces of modern art, Malevich’s Black Square (1915), was “without doubt …
an icon.”10 In this particular case, Benois was implying a conceptual parallel
rather than a formal resemblance—one that Malevich had undoubtedly in-
tended by hanging his Black Square in the “sacred corner” of the gallery at the
0.10: Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting in St. Petersburg (Fig. A.1).11 This pro-
vocative placement implied that the Black Square had by analogy assumed the
icon’s consummate totality as the “zero of form.”12 Moreover, Malevich’s subse-
quent multiple copies of the Black Square, as well as its virulent reproduction
in miniature on plates, cups, saucers, clothes, and architectural models, further
enacted its claims to iconicity as a “sacred” prototype.13
The leftist art historian and critic Nikolai Punin similarly traced a theoreti-
cal lineage between the Russo-Byzantine artistic tradition and the newly mint-
ed Russian avant-garde of the nineteen teens. Analyzing Vladimir Tatlin’s 1915
Corner Counter-Reliefs (Fig. A.2), Punin argued that the artist’s paradigmatic
shift into three-dimensionality was deeply indebted to the iconic tradition,
both in terms of material heterogeneity and the conceptual shift from pictorial
to real space.14 Moreover, having studied medieval art at St. Petersburg Uni-
versity under the direction of the well-known Byzantinist Dmitri Ainalov,
Punin believed that Byzantine art and its Russian variant belonged to a

9 Alexander Benois, “Khudozhestvenyie Pisma: Ikony i Novoe Iskusstvo (Letters on Art:

Icons and the New Art),” Rech’ 93 (5 April 1913): 4.
10 Alexander Benois, “Review of the 0.10 Exhibition,” Rech’ (9 January, 1916), quoted in Linda
S. Boersma, 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994),
70.
11 The sacred or “red corner”—krasnyi ugol—is a small worship space in the corner of a
room, just under the ceiling, which is traditionally reserved for Orthodox icons in domes-
tic spaces.
12 Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Paint-
ing, 1915 in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans.
John E. Bowlt, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 118.
13 There are at least three known copies of the Black Square, which Malevich executed in
1923, 1929, and 1932.
14 Nikolai Punin, Tatlin (Protiv Kubizma) (St. Petersburg: Gos. izd-vo, 1921).
Introduction to Part 1 5

figure A.1 Kazimir Malevich. Black Square (1915). Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm (31
5/16 × 31 5/16 in). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. On display
at the Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0,10 (nol’-desiat’)
(Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 [zero-ten]),
Khudozhestvennoe Biuro, Petrograd, December 1915–Janu-
ary 1916.

figure A.2 Vladimir Tatlin. Corner Counter-Relief (1914–15). Iron, aluminum,

paint, dimensions unknown. Location unknown. On display at the
Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0,10 (nol’-desiat’) (Last
Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 [zero-ten]), Khudo-
zhestvennoe Biuro, Petrograd, December 1915–January 1916.
6 Taroutina

fundamentally different artistic tradition from that of the Western European

canon. Unlike Fry and Benois, Punin considered modern French painting and
Byzantine art to be diametrically opposed, both stylistically and conceptually.
For Punin, the most recent French art—exemplified by Picasso’s Cubist paint-
ings—marked the end of the “old school of painting” rather than “the dawn of
a new era.”15 Punin understood Cubism as the continuation of Impressionism,
which he saw as an essentially “naturalist” project, much as Roger Fry did. After
all, despite its seemingly abstract visual vocabulary, Cubism was still a repre-
sentational style, rooted in external reality and interested in playing “with the
difference between, and collision of, illusion and reality, representation and
its model.”16 By contrast, the Byzantine tradition presupposed an entirely
different relationship between the image and that which it represented. In-
stead of being an illusionistic “window” onto some perceived reality, the icon
was a physical materialization of that reality—a direct “presentation” of it.
Similarly, the different materials that Tatlin employed in his Corner Counter-
Reliefs remained autonomous and abstract “presentations” in so far as they
were not made to stand in for something else within the representational logic
of the artwork.
Accordingly, in his 1913 article, “On the Problem of Byzantine Art,” Punin
argued that only the rediscovery of Byzantine art could catalyze a genuinely
new direction in contemporary European painting.17 Holding up Tatlin as a
paradigmatic example of this new direction, Punin explained that the artist’s
“culture of materials” and shift into “real space” had evolved out of his direct
exposure to the Russo-Byzantine artistic tradition, given his training as an icon
painter in the workshops of Moscow and Yaroslavl.18 Indeed, as Otto Demus
had convincingly demonstrated in 1948, instead of functioning purely pictori-
ally, the Middle Byzantine mosaic image actually projected itself into real
space, collapsing the separation between the exclusively representational
realm of the artwork and the lived environment of the viewer.19 Although De-
mus’s theory was formulated over two decades after Punin’s initial publication
of Tatlin (Against Cubism), it is evident both from this and Punin’s other essays

15 Punin, Tatlin. Reprinted in Nikolai Punin, O Tatline, eds. I.N. Punina and V.I. Rakitin
(Moscow: Literaturno-khudozhestvennoe agenstvo “RA”, 1994), 28–41.
16 Paul Wood, “The Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism,” in
The Challenge of the Avant-Garde, ed. Paul Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999),
221
17 Nikolai Punin, “K probleme Vizantiiskogo Iskusstva,”Apollon 3 (March 1913): 25.
18 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 11.
19 Otto Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration: Aspects of Monumental Art in Byzantium
(Boston: Boston Book & Art Shop, 1955), 13–14.
Introduction to Part 1 7

that he had already understood the representational complexities and concep-

tual possibilities that Byzantine images offered for modernist artistic practice.20
Although such Byzantine/modern analogies were more prevalent in Russia
because of the country’s lengthy historical relationship with Byzantium and its
resulting cultural, religious, and artistic affinities, similar aesthetic and theo-
retical trends were nonetheless equally present in Germany and Austria. At the
turn of the century, artists and critics alike were quick to seize on the formal
and conceptual resonances between Byzantium, Jugendstil, and Expression-
ism. For example, Gustav Klimt actively associated his “Golden Period” paint-
ings with the Byzantine representational mode and Julius Meier-Graefe
positioned Byzantine mosaics as important precursors to many of the new ten-
dencies that he was witnessing in fin-de-siècle European art.21 Wilhelm Wor-
ringer likewise located what he considered to be the universal, timeless drive
toward abstraction in the hieratic and anti-organic aspect of Byzantine repre-
sentation; while Vasily Kandinsky illustrated his treatise on abstract painting,
On the Spiritual in Art, with a reproduction of the San Vitale mosaic in Raven-
na, similarly implying a correlation between the seeds of abstraction and Byz-
antine art. Other compelling cases of modernist interest in and experimentation
with the art and image theory of Byzantium were likewise present in Italy,
Greece, the Balkan states, and Eastern and Central Europe, and it is therefore
the hope of the editors that the case studies discussed in Byzantium/Modern-
ism will encourage further inquiry into this subject.
Indeed, the diverse and repeated appeals to Byzantine art in relation to ca-
nonical modernist movements such as Post-Impressionism, Cubism, German

20 Punin had a considerable background in medieval art and theory. He trained as a medie-
valist at St. Petersburg University under the direction of the famous Byzantinist Dmitri
Ainalov. In 1913, he began to work in the Department of Christian Antiquities of the State
Russian Museum, and in the following year he was simultaneously elected as the secre-
tary of the Society for the Study of Medieval Russian Art and as a member of the editorial
board for the journal Russkaya Ikona or Russian Icon. One of Punin’s first major publica-
tions was a lengthy study of the works of Andrei Rublev, so it is evident that he would
have been highly attuned to the formal complexities and pictorial particularities of
Byzantine representation. For an overview of Punin’s biography, see V.N. Petrov,
“N.N. Punin i ego iskusstvovedcheskie raboti,” in N.N. Punin, Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo:
Izbrannye trudy o russkom i sovetskom izobrazitel’nom iskusstve; Mastera russkogo iskusstva
XIV–nachala XX veka: sov. khudozhniki, ed. I.N. Punina (Moscow: Sov. khudozhnik, 1976),
7–32.
21 See Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst. Vergleichende
Betrachtung der bildenden Künste, als Beitrag zu einer neuen Aesthetik. 3 vols. (Stuttgart:
Verlag Julius Hofmann, 1904).
8 Taroutina

Expressionism, abstract painting, Suprematism, and Constructivism, among

others, cannot simply be dismissed as the theoretical vagaries of the early
twentieth century. Instead, they invite a sustained inquiry into how and why
Byzantium became such an attractive representational and conceptual model
in the inception and articulation of modernist aesthetics. What did modern art
try to learn from Byzantium and how did Byzantine image philosophy contrib-
ute to the continually shifting landscape of avant-garde polemics? More impor-
tantly, what does contemporary scholarship have to gain from the re-inscription
of Byzantine art and theory into the modernist narrative?
This volume aims to address some of these questions by demonstrating that
these multiple and pervasive “Byzantine parallels” were not merely accidental
or isolated incidents, but were in fact conscious dialectical strategies for mod-
ernist self-definition. There was, of course, nothing new in the avant-garde’s
espousal of earlier art forms as a means of reinventing a moribund and ex-
hausted artistic culture. From the English Pre-Raphaelites to Gauguin and Pi-
casso, various modern artists looked to the past and to foreign cultures as rich
repositories of “primitive” pictorial elements such as flatness, abstraction, dec-
orative opulence, and spatial ambiguity. However, as Nikolai Punin presciently
perceived in the early twentieth century, the unique and complex ontological
status of Byzantine images as both of this world and not, meant that they radi-
cally departed from the dominant conceptual model of art propagated by the
Western pictorial tradition. As “presentations” rather than representations of
the divine, they presupposed an entirely different relationship between the
subject and the object, the viewer and the artwork, and the material and im-
material realms. Accordingly, moving beyond mere formal homologies be-
tween Byzantine and modern art, the authors in the present volume probe
deeper into the philosophical, ontological, and epistemic frameworks that
structured the Byzantium/modernism encounter.
While a number of excellent recent publications have explored the topic of
the “medieval/modern” encounter broadly defined, such as Alexander Nagel’s
Medieval/Modern, Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition, Laura Marks’s
Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, and Amy
Knight Powell’s Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Mod-
ern Museum, few have focused exclusively on its Byzantine variant. Given the
ontological particularity of the Byzantine image, the present study strives to
move beyond the generalizations of “medieval,” “Christian,” “spiritual,” or “reli-
gious” to analyze specifically how and what was meant and understood by the
term “Byzantine.” In addition, the essays in this book engage questions of
atemporality, cross-temporality, and anachronism by analyzing the Byzan-
tium/modernism encounter both within the chronologically specific matrix of
Introduction to Part 1 9

modernity and more flexibly as a methodological and theoretical construct.

Those few studies that have focused specifically on the Byzantine image and its
impact on modern art, such as Andrew Spira’s The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian
Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition, Jefferson Gatrall’s and Douglas
Greenfield’s Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, and Glenn Peers’s
“Utopia and Heterotopia: Byzantine Modernisms in America,” have tended to
be regionally circumscribed to the art and culture of a single nation. Accord-
ingly, instead of grouping the essays by region, the editors of the present vol-
ume have tried to outline a broader, transnational narrative, examining key
thematic and conceptual continuities and discontinuities across, rather than
within, nations.
Having said that, it is important to mention a few significant exceptions,
where the authors have explored Byzantium’s legacy in modernity across a
broader geographical and chronological span. These include Barrie Bullen’s
Byzantium Rediscovered, Glenn Peers’s Byzantine Things in the World and Ma-
rie-José Mondzain’s Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contem-
porary Imaginary. The latter, in particular, proposes an alternative theoretical
framework for understanding the power and ubiquity of the image in modern
and contemporary visual culture by tracing a discursive lineage all the way
back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centu-
ries. Building on this seminal study, it is the ambition of the present volume to
expand the methodological and discursive field for engaging questions about
Byzantium and its multivalent meanings in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies in order to re-imagine worn-out art-historical teleologies in novel and
stimulating ways.
Accordingly, Byzantium/Modernism brings together a number of method-
ological approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives, and explores a diverse
range of media from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, includ-
ing painting, architecture, theater, literature, photography, and film. Robert S.
Nelson opens the volume with an essay on “Modernism’s Byzantiums Byzan-
tium’s Modernisms,” in which he analyzes the complex ways in which “mod-
ernism” and “Byzantium” are mutually informed constructs. As modernism
absorbed Byzantium into its complex genealogy, it recast the understanding
and study of Byzantine art and architecture in its own image for decades to
come. Indeed, as Nelson observes, “Byzantine art would never be the same
again.” Exposing the multiple biases and motivations that underwrote mod-
ernism’s self-articulation vis-à-vis the past, Nelson suggests that the goals,
aims, and aesthetics of Byzantine art and architecture have been largely mis-
represented and misread in the course of the twentieth century in order to
accommodate modernism’s own powerful self-mythologizing. Nelson persua·
10 Taroutina

sively demonstrates that modernism’s Byzantium and Byzantium’s modernism

are unstable and continually shifting binaries that necessitate more nuanced
methodological models of interpretation and analysis than they have hitherto
been accorded.
Robert Ousterhout and Tulay Atak develop this theme further, examining
the dualities and complexities that underwrote the Byzantium/modernism en-
counter in architecture. In her essay on Le Corbusier’s continuous interest in
the Hagia Sophia, Atak explores the importance of Byzantine sacred spaces to
the modernist imaginary. Analyzing Le Corbusier’s sketches of the church in
relation to his 1926 article, “Architecture d’Epoque Machiniste,” Atak argues
that architectural modernism was deeply indebted to its Byzantine predeces-
sor in its attempt to renegotiate and reorganize the relation between the visi-
ble and the invisible by means of abstraction. Conversely, Robert Ousterhout
explores how the goals and aims of Byzantine architecture have been largely
misrepresented, misunderstood, and misinterpreted in the course of the twen-
tieth century. Influenced by the modernist ideals of simplicity, clarity, and
functionality at the expense of an activated and embodied architectural idiom,
twentieth-century scholarship, according to Ousterhout, has fundamentally
negated the mobile, dynamic, and participatory aspects of Byzantine architec-
ture. By re-examining the notions of sacred versus profane space, representa-
tional versus abstract idioms, and participatory versus static modalities of
viewing, Ousterhout and Atak demonstrate the dual impact that the Byzan-
tium/modernism encounter had on the architectural imagination.
Myroslava Mudrak likewise considers the ways in which sacred spaces and
practices may have shaped the aesthetic and conceptual formation of one of
modernism’s most radical representatives: Kazimir Malevich. Moving beyond
the narrow confines of formal appropriation, Mudrak considers how the multi-
sensorial, synesthetic environment of the Orthodox Church might have in-
fluenced Malevich’s artistic development. More specifically, she examines
Malevich’s primitivizing fresco cycle from 1907 in relation to Orthodox ritual
and ceremony, as well as the theological writings of the Eastern Christian litur-
gical tradition, and speculates as to how and why this early experience could
have contributed to the artist’s subsequent transition to Suprematism. By ex-
ploring a little-known period in Malevich’s art, Mudrak suggests that his inter-
est in Orthodox representation significantly predated the Black Square.
Furthermore, the author implies that Malevich’s ongoing conceptual engage-
ment with the Byzantine transcended momentary polemical provocation and
avant-garde sensationalism and should be understood as a larger theme within
his oeuvre.
Introduction to Part 1 11

Last but not least, Elena Boeck’s and Dimitra Kotoula’s essays expand the
scope of the Byzantium/modernism encounter beyond the hermetic realm of
the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Here “modernism” is no longer under-
stood as a narrowly defined set of radical artistic and utopian aims, but rather
as a more ubiquitous cultural response to the continually shifting conditions of
modernity. These included increased travel, new archeological discoveries,
evolving historical knowledge and an ever-growing demand for fresh forms of
entertainment, distraction, and aesthetic expression in the public realm. By
exploring the ways in which the Byzantine was restaged in the larger public
imaginary as a generative symbol of alterity already in the 1880s, Boeck’s and
Kotoula’s essays point to the pressing need to re-inscribe Byzantium into the
broader discourse of late nineteenth-century modernity. Reflecting a complex
triangulation of radicalism, exoticism, nationalism, imperialism, traditional-
ism, revivalism, and avant-gardism, the nineteenth-century engagement with
Byzantium traversed the boundaries between the high and the low, East and
West, the fine and the decorative arts, and between modernism and its others.
As Elena Boeck persuasively demonstrates, in his theatrical rendition of Theo-
dora, the playwright Victorien Sardou presented audiences with an exotic and
tantalizing visual world that he had transformed beyond all historical recogni-
tion, all the while insisting on its “archaeological authenticity.” Capitalizing on
the most recent archaeological discoveries and academic publications, Sar-
dou’s decadent, Orientalizing and seductive vision of medieval Constantino-
ple and its inhabitants was thus deeply imbricated in the simultaneous
consumption and production of knowledge about Byzantium. Along similar
lines, Dimitra Kotoula analyzes how the meticulous archaeological research
on some of the major Byzantine monuments of Italy, Turkey, and the Greek
islands, carried out by leading Arts and Crafts architects Robert-Weir Schultz,
Sidney H. Barnsley, Walter S. George, William Harvey, and Ramsay Traquair,
came to bear on the art, literature, and philosophy of the Arts and Crafts move-
ment. In particular, Kotoula examines how the reception and interpretation of
Byzantium by the founding members of the movement fundamentally affect-
ed their development as artists and architects and fuelled the subsequent pop-
ularization of “the Byzantine” among a broader public.
The present volume strives to move beyond the two poles of a narrowly cir-
cumscribed revivalism on the one hand, and a clearly defined modernist agen-
da on the other. Instead, it delineates a rich multiplicity of ways in which the
Byzantine was understood, constructed, and represented under the conditions
of modernity. It is evident that rather than being a stable signifier, Byzantium
came to reflect a number of competing aspirations, goals, and philosophies.
From theater, Art Nouveau jewelry, and furniture designs, to the interior
12 Taroutina

figure A.3 The Princess of Dreams (La Princesse Lointaine). Metropol Hotel. Moscow,
1893–1903. The composition is a copy of Mikhail Vrubel’s painting, The Princess of
Dreams (La Princesse Lointaine), 1896. Oil on canvas. 750 × 1400 cm. The ceramic
tiles for the Metropol façade were produced in S. I. Mamontov’s Abramtsevo Ceramic
Factory.

decoration of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Mikhail Vrubel’s 1902 mosaic fa-
çade for the Metropol Hotel in Moscow (Fig. A.3), and Barry Faulkner’s 1933
“Intelligence Awakening Mankind” mosaic on the Rockefeller Center in New
York, Byzantine aesthetics traversed various geographies, temporalities, and
media to permeate our visual consciousness and material culture in substan-
tial and lasting ways. The ambition of this volume, therefore, is to chart both
the scope of these pervasive Byzantine iterations and their continued signifi-
cance to the present day. To sum up then, Byzantium/Modernism hopes to pose
a new set of interesting questions and to generate fresh approaches to Byzan-
tium, modernism, and Byzantium/modernism.
Introduction to Part 1 13

Section 1
The Avant-Gardes and Their Counter Movements

∵
14 Taroutina