Clement Greenberg, “Byzantine Parallels” (1958),

in Art and Culture. Essays 1961, 167-170.

Byzantine Parallels

Of all the great traditions of pictorial naturalism, only the

Greco-Roman and the Western can be said to be sculpturally
oriented. They alone have made full use of the sculptural
means of light and shade to obtain an illusion of volume on a
fiat surface. And both these traditions arrived at so-called
scientific perspective only because a thoroughgoing illusion of
volume required a consistent illusion of the kind of space in
which volume was possible.
The tendency of modernist painting has been to turn the
conventions of sculptural natUralism inside out, and to create
thereby a kind of pictorial space that would invoke no sense
other than that of sight. With tactility excluded, shading and
perspective disappear. Modernist sculpture itself, recognizing
that it is enjoyed visually in the main, has followed painting in
the trend toward the exclusively optical, becoming in its Con·
structivist manifestations more and more an art of aerial draw·
ing in which three-dimensional space is indicated and enclosed
but hardly filled.
Not a preference for the "abstract" as such, but confine·
ment either to fiat pictorial or open sculptural space accounts
for the progressive elimination of the representational. Any.
thing that suggests a recognizable entity (and all recognizable
entities exist in three dimensions) suggests tactility or the kind
of space in which tactile experience is possible. Modernist
painting and sculpture are alienated not so much from "na·
ture" as from the nonvisual.
Realism, naturalism, illusion have attained extremes in
Western art that were reached nowhere else. But nowhere else,
either, has art ever become as opaque and self-contained, as
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wholly and exclusively art, as it has in the very recent Western
past. It is as if this extreme could have been produced only by
its opposite.
Once before, however, a system of sculptural illusion in
pictorial art underwent a devolution that converted it into a
means for attaining effects that were the antithesis of sculptural.
In Late Roman and in Byzantine art, the naturalistic devices
of Greco-Roman painting were turned inside out to reaffirm
the flatness of pictorial space; light and shade-the means par
excellence of sculptural illusion-were stylized into flat patterns
and used for decorative or quasi-abstract ends instead of illu-
sionist ones. Just as with our modernists, literalness was recov-
ered through the means of illusion itself, and attained its impact
and significance from the contradiction. That significance
would not have been as great, artistically, had the literalness
issued from a pictorial tradition that had been less oriented in
the first place toward the sculptural and the illusionist; the
power of Cubism and of Byzantine mural art alike implies the
wrench, and the "dialectic," by which a long and rich tradition
has reversed its direction; it is in part retroactifle power.
Parallels between Byzantine and modernist art abound in
sculpture too. Like modernist construction, Byzantine carving
tended toward pictorial, nontactile effects; it concentrated on
bas-relief, and made bas-relief itself lower, less rounded and
modeled, more undercut and perforated, than it had been in
Greco-Roman practice. Simultaneously, the distinction between
the decorative and the nondecorative tended to get blurred,
whether in painting or sculpture, just as it has been in mod-
ernist art. And while the Byzantines never renounced the
representational in principle, it is possible to discern in Icono-
clasm, despite the fact that its motives were entirely religious,
the echo of certain aesthetically felt objections to the figurative.
Nor has the advent of the completely abstract easel picture
(which is to say, of nonrepresentational art in a representational
context), or the more recent supersession of Cubist flatness by
an even more ambiguous Impressionist kind, really narrowed
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the parallels between modernist and Byzantine pictorial art.
Neither Byzantine nor modernist art has rested with the mere
dismantling of sculptural illusion. Byzantine painting and
mosaic moved from the beginning toward a vision of full color
in which the role of light-and-dark contrast was radically
diminished. In Gauguin and in Late Impressionism, something
similar had already begun to happen, and now, after Cubism,
American painters like Newman, Rothko and Still seem almost
to polemicize against value contrasts. They attempt to expel
every reminiscence of sculptural illusion by creating a counter-
illusion of light alone-a counterillusion which consists in the
projection of an indeterminate surface of warm and luminous
color in front of the actual painted surface. Pollock, in his
middle period, worked toward the same effect, and perhaps
achieved it more unmistakably with his aluminum paint and
interlaced threads of light and dark pigment. This new kind
of modernist picture, like the Byzantine gold and glass mosaic,
comes forward to fill the space between itself and the spectator
with its radiance. And it combines in similar fashion the
monumentally decorative with the pictorially emphatic, at the
same time that it uses the most self-evidently corporeal means
to deny its own corporeality.
The parallels between Byzantine and modernist art can-
not be extended indefinitely, but-as David Talbot Rice has
suggested in a different context-they may help us discern
at least part of the extra-artistic significance of modernism.
The Byzantines dematerialized firsthand reality by invoking
a transcendent one. We seem to be doing something similar
in our science as well as art, insofar as we invoke the material
against itself by insisting on its all-encompassing reality. The
Byzantines excluded appeals to literal experience against the
transcendent, whereas we seem to exclude appeals to anything
but the literal; but in both cases the distinction between the
firsthand and the secondhand tends to get blurred. When
something becomes everything it also becomes less real, and
what the latest abstract painting seems to harp on is the ques-
169
tionability of the material and the corporeal. A radically
transcendental and a radically positivist exclusiveness both
arrive at anti-illusionist, or rather counter-illusionist, art. Once
again, extremes meet.