stefan arteni

byzantine painting: conventions and the emergence of complexity

a visual essay
Christ Anapeson, Russia, 1800 http://www.antikhof.de/Kunstver mittlung/Ikonen/Ikone_15107/ik one_15107.html

solinvictus press 2011

Teaching by example (master and apprentice)

Cristiano Castelfranchi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies CNR, When Doing is Saying. From Implicit Communication to Tacit Conventions via Silent Agreements, Vietri SIFA/AISC Conference, October 2 -3/03 http://sifa.unige.it/vietri/abstract/castelfranchi.pdf

Emmanuel Moutafov, Europeanization on Paper. Treatises on Painting in Greek during the First Half of the 18th Century, 2001

The emergence of the western practice of compiling texts on painting is found to highlight the essentially oral transmission of skills in the East prior to the early eighteenth century Claire Brisby, Courtauld Institute of Art, London http://www.balkans21.org/2002_1/moutafov_eng.html

openlibrary.org/books/OL1472211M/The_'_ Painter's_manua... Dionysius of Fourna, The Painters Manual, 20th century English translations of the 18th century handbook ikonostasis.blogspot.com/2009/07/ikonosta sis-e.html

Dionysius of Fourna, The Painters Manual, Romanian translation of the 18th century handbook, Sophia Publishers, Bucharest, 2000 http://www.scribd.co m/doc/32971887/Dio nisie-Din-FurnaErminia-PicturiiBizantine

Cybernetics may be defined as a play of potentialities and constraints. "This is how we must read the theory of those medieval philosophers," Giorgio Agamben writes, "who held that the passage from potentiality to act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite series of modal oscillations. There is an interaction between kinesthetic/spatiomotor and visual input. The traces of medium-specific actions are defined by Peer Bundgaard as exploitation of ontic constraints. Improvisation may involve repetition and revision, embedded in which are appropriative allusions to and fragmented citations of previous historical practices - it is up to the painter to reactivate the past. Ranulph Glanville describes art as an iterative and circular process with the unknowable and concludes: Art is deeply cybernetic. we must understand the constraints which will select the actually occurring processes out of the potential ones, that is the dynamics of possible distinction processes, the dynamics of attractors and that of attractors and distinction destruction [paraphrasing Francis Heylighen.] One should heed that story of Correggio standing before some great masterpiece and exclaiming: Anch' io son' pittore ["I too, am a painter!".] This is how 'art constructs art' [S.J.Schmidt.]

Learning from the examination of previously executed works

Cristiano Castelfranchi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies CNR, When Doing is Saying. From Implicit Communication to Tacit Conventions via Silent Agreements, Vietri SIFA/AISC Conference, October 2 -3/03 http://sifa.unige.it/vietri/abstract/castelfranchi.pdf

The transmission of sets of images, the recurrence of constructs, the chain of constructs that function as antecedents, as links, as products of artistic conventions, as elaborated versions of models where diachronic changes add new layers to the visual palimpsest, replication by repeated instantiation paradoxically underscoring the impossibility of invariant repetition, are a conscious process involving free and purposeful re-thinking and re-interpreting of the tradition, and an imagery that is re-imagined [polyvariance, appropriation, substitution, transposition, metamorphoses and attenuations, interpretation, adaptation, quotation and self-quotation, re-use, hidden and stylistic quotations, transposition, de- and re-contextualization.]

A hand-written annotation to a book, found in Spain in a copy of Lives of the most excellent architects, painters and sculptors by Giorgio Vasari, has led Nicos Hadjinicolau, a researcher from the Institute of Mediterranean Studies, to conclude that the artist contrary to popular belief was a defender of Byzantine art. A literal translation of the note attributed to the painter reads: If [Vasari] really knew the nature of the Greek style of which he speaks, he would deal with it differently in what he says. He compares it with Giotto, but what Giotto did is simple in comparison, because the Greek style is full of ingenious difficulties. El Greco obtained the book from which this annotation was taken during Italian painter Federico Zuccaros visit to Toledo in May 1586. Nicos Hadjinicolau, La defensa del arte Bizantino por El Greco: notas sobre una paradoja, Archivo Espaol de Arte, LXXXI (323) 217-232, July September 2008

Game theory and the emergence of complexity To study the development of graphical conventions we had members of a simulated community play a series of graphical interaction games the graphical conventions that evolve within a closed community constitute higher order cognitions, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Nicolas Fay, Simon Garrod, Tracy MacLeod, John Lee, John Oberlander, Design, Adaptation and Convention: The Emergence of Higher Order Graphical Representations, http://www.cogsci.northwestern.edu/cogsci2004/papers/paper513pdf

Communication The results show that graphical signs that evolve within a community offer distinct advantages when compared with those that locally develop among isolated pairs. In particular, the meaning associated with a particular sign is more accessible for a subsequent generation of sign learnersBut what about the global evolution unique to the community signs? In a group context, signs need to be effective both in terms of communicative fitness within each pair of the group and in terms of transmission fitness for other group members. Our results indicate that communities achieve this by developing increasingly simple signs, but nevertheless signs that retain sufficient residual iconicity to be easily recognizedand learnedby new members of the population from which the community was drawn. So, in both community and isolated pair conditions, graphical signs evolve functionally, becoming progressively refined and therefore more efficiently produced and decoded by interlocutors. However, only community evolved signs exhibit learning and decoding benefits for persons not actively engaged in sign construction. As these benefits are unanticipated (i.e the signs are not designed with an external audience in mind), sign fitness is a functional by-product of adaptation in the community condition. Nicolas Fay, Simon Garrod and Leo Roberts, The fitness and functionality of culturally evolved communication systems, http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1509/3553.full.pdf

Manuel Panselinos, Protaton monastery, Mount Athos, 14th century? photo AndreyA

Manuel Panselinos, Protaton monastery, Mount Athos, 14th century? http://www.eikonografos.com/album/displayimage.php?pid=3655&fullsize=1

St Nikita (Nicetas) church, 1320, Banjani, Macedonia http://users.stlcc.ed u/mfuller/stnikita.ht ml

Detail, St Nikita (Nicetas) church, 1320, Banjani, Macedonia http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/stniki ta.html

Christ Recumbent portrayed in a wall-painting in the Katholikon, 1300-1335, of the monastery of Timios Prodromos (Saint John the Baptist), Serres, Greece http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/HellenicMacedonia/en/img_C291b.html

St John the Evangelist church at Lakkous, Kroustas, Crete, 14th century lasithitour.bpis.teicrete.gr/religious/map.php?page =map&lang=&...

Theophanes the Cretan, Stavronikita monastery, mount Athos, 16th century http://www.ortho doxyicons.com/icons ofmountathos/2 83-monasterystavronikitaathos-partiii.html

Theophanes the Cretan, Stavronikita monastery, mount Athos, 16th century http://www.orth odoxyicons.com/icon sofmountathos/ 282monasterystavronikitaathos-partii.html

Details, Theophanes the Cretan, Stavronikita monastery, mount Athos, 16th century http://www.orthodoxyicons.com/iconsofmountathos/282monastery-stavronikita-athos-part-ii.html

Detail, Theophanes the Cretan, Stavronikita monastery, mount Athos, 16th century http://www.orthodoxyicons.com/iconsofmountathos/282monastery-stavronikita-athos-part-ii.html

Russia? 16th century Ikonen-Museum, Recklinghausen, Germany http://www.iconart.info/masterpi ece.php?lng=de &mst_id=2204

Zographer Toma from Suceava and his team, Dormition (Assumption) church, Humor monastery, Romania, 16th century https://picasaweb.google.com/105439384446274577188/BucovinaManastiri#

Cozia monastery, Holy Apostles Bolnitachurch, Romania, 16th century https://picasaweb.google.com/nisico84

Cozia monastery, Holy Apostles Bolnitachurch, Romania, 16th century www.crestinortodox.ro/biserici-manastiri/bolnita-cozia-67960.html

Dragos Coman zographer, Arbore monastery, Beheading of St John the Baptist church, 16th century https://picasaweb.google.com/andr33ach/August2007ManastireaArbore#

Dragos Coman zographer, Arbore monastery, Beheading of St John the Baptist church, 16th century https://picasaweb.google.com/andr33ach/August2007ManastireaArbore#

Russia, 16th century http://www.obra z.org/index.php ?menu=iconogr aphy&base=2& struct=162&icon _id=1262

Russia, 16th century http://www.obr az.org/index.p hp?menu=icon ography&base =2&struct=162 &icon_id=126 4

Clocociov monastery, 17th century, Romania https://picasaweb.google.com/107005351363667679364/MreaCLOCOCIOV#

Clocociov monastery, 17th century, Romania http://www.flickr. com/photos/nori da/2813309295/ sizes/l/in/set7215760703374 0782/

St Stephen church, Nessebar, Bulgaria, 11th 18th centuries https://picasaweb.google.com/105373273489975162393/StStephenChurchNessebar#

St Stephen church, Nessebar, Bulgaria, 11th 18th centuries https://picasaweb.google.com/105373273489975162393/StStephenChurchNessebar#

St Stephen church, Nessebar, Bulgaria, 11th 18th centuries https://picasaweb.google.com/105373273489975162393/StStephenChurchNessebar#

St Stephen church, Nessebar, Bulgaria, 11th 18th centuries https://picasaweb.google.com/105373273489975162393/StStephenChurchNessebar#

St Stephen church, Nessebar, Bulgaria, 11th 18th centuries https://picasaweb.google.com/105373273489975162393/StStephenChurchNessebar#

Christ the Non-sleeping Eye, Russia, 17th century www.macdougallauction.co m/indexp.asp?P_month=Jun e09&sCategory=...

Govora monastery, Romania, 18th century http://amfostacolo.ro/FOTO/GENUINE/d005/5203/6036_7545_4.jpg

Govora monastery, Romania, 18th century https://picasaweb.google.com/108839677152717835690/OFugaPrinOltenia#

Christ Anapesson (a representation of the young Christ asleep), Kellion St John the Baptist, Dependency of Koutloumousiou Monastery, Mount Athos, fresco by Dionysios of Fourna, 18th century http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/Athos/General/Art.html

Christ the Neversleeping-Eye with Archangels and kings David and Solomon, tympanum of the Royal Doors of the Papraa Iconostasis, Tuzla Episcopal Palace, Bosnia, tempera on wood, 66x153.2 cm, Stanoje Popovi from Martinet (Srem), around 1750 www.rastko.rs/rastko-bl/umetnost/likovne/srakic-ikone/srakic-i...

Russia, 18th 19th centuries www.imkinsky .com/en/inde x-ofartists/item/? KatNr=0654& AukNr=63...

Russia, early 20th century, State Museum of Palekh Art http://www.ico nart.info/hires.p hp?lng=ru&typ e=1&id=3318