Byzantium at The Temple Gallery
50th Anniversary Exhibition 10th March - 30th June 2009
Byzantine, Greek and Cretan Icons
and Art Objects.
I started the Temple Gallery fifty years ago at 8 Sloane Street in Knightsbridge. I was twenty two. My aim then – and still is now – was contact with the ideas and energies of the sacred through art and through spiritual practice. This study can provide intimations of another life – not the life we lead in time but of our life in eternity. Our present culture scarcely has a language for this and conventional religion, today somewhat marginalised, seems to offer only unconvincing platitudes. But the art of a theocracy like Byzantium, evolving out of Neoplatonism and the theologians and mystics of the early centuries, evolved a symbolic imagery capable of speaking to us at a deep, albeit subconscious, level.
With Byzantine art and its derivatives in Russia, Greece, the Balkans and Crete we can encounter the work of craftsmen whose inner world was structured differently from ours. Their concept of divine presence and divine energies represented realities that modern day ‘scientism’ has largely eviscerated. And yet the longing for authentic spiritual meaning and spiritual order within themselves continues to be felt by many people. I have shown, in Icons and the Mystical Origins of Christianity, that the imagery of early Christian and Byzantine art is founded on the perennial forms that, in European civilization, go back to Plato and those aspects of Platonism (or Neoplatonism) that interacted with Christianity in the 4th and 5th centuries. The echo of these values is still there in the icons and the works of art assembled for this exhibition. In some it is perhaps only faintly heard; in others the sound is stronger.
I am grateful to those who helped produce this catalogue; among them Dr Christian Schmidt for his article The Christogram and Other Early Christian Symbols, to Eleni Dimitriadou of the Courtauld Institute for help with Greek inscriptions and other research questions, to Ilona Rodgers for Cyrillic texts on embroideries, to the photographer Mat Pia, to Jo Elford for proof reading and to my assistant Paola Di Celmo.
Richard Temple |
