On 15 February, as part of the programme prepared for the opening of Umberto Mariani’s exhibition in the General Staff building, Silvia Ronchey gave a lecture entitled “The Way to Byzantium: the cult and culture of the icon from Plato to abstract art”.
Silvia Ronchey is an Italian curator, a professor of the Roma Tre University, the author of numerous books and essays, a journalist and specialist in Byzantine culture.
Reflecting on the closeness of the ties between abstract art and icon-painting, Professor Ronchey spoke about her own research that was based on the question of representation and figurative art as “a copy of copies”. The audience were invited to make the long journey from the realm of Platonic ideas about the ephemeral nature of the world of the senses to 20th-century abstract art.
One of the topics discussed was Byzantium at the time of the “struggle against the cult of the idol” and iconoclasm that the scholar interprets not as a physical act of annihilation, but as an intellectual act. Here Ronchey stresses an aspect that is important for the connection between icon-painting and abstractionism: “The icon shows us that beyond the imperfection of the material world there is another world, ideal and pure as crystal.”
Those attending the lecture were presented with a series of interesting and often unexpected visual parallels between the abstract treatment of folds in Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity, the geometry of Kliment Redko’s Suprematism, icon-painting of the Rostov and Novgorod schools, Wassily Kandinsky’s “abstract illustrations of Scripture”, the works of Henri Matisse and the “icons” of Andy Warhol and Yves Klein with his “Byzantine blue”.
It is this “Byzantine blue” in particular that in Ronchey’s account becomes the connecting link between mediaeval icon-painting and the abstract art of Umberto Mariani, in whose work we can find “the acute angle of Suprematism, sacred vestments and stylized draped crosses”.
Having arrived at his particular kind of abstract art through everything enumerated above, Mariani engages, in the scholar’s words, not simply “in the transfiguration of form, but of humanity itself”.
