August 23, 2018 Thursday
Bedtime Story
On Byzantine Icons
As seen from the development of Renaissance
art, mathematics actually greatly enriched both the art and the architecture of
the time and hence the period is in fact seen as a great cultural advance as
well rather than a scientific one alone.
The first major advance in the Renaissance
art came through the mind and works of Giotto di Bondone who can either be
placed in the late Medieval Ages or very early Renaissance period.
Giotto was born in Florence in 1267 who is
credited to be the first to make a major shift from the prevalent Byzantine
(Eastern Roman) form of art which has its strong representation in the Russian
icons.
Russian icons are so classical that if you
have seen them once you would be hard pressed to miss out on the others.
Icons by definition are religious work of
arts most commonly in the form of paintings that belong to the Eastern Orthodox
Church which just like any sect of Christianity considers itself to be the
practitioner of the original Christian faith.
Eastern Orthodox Church is the second
largest Christian Church after the Catholic Church with 270 million adherents
world over (in contrast to Catholic church that has a massive chunk of 1.285
billion followers out of the total 2.42 billion Christians).
Just to see the list of currently existing
Christian Churches and their sects is good enough to either drive you nuts or
to convince you that human apes are truly nutty creatures.
Insanity rules!
There were periods in the history of
Byzantine Empire where the use of images or icons to represent anything
religious was banned or made forbidden by the collaboration of both the high
Priests and the Emperors such as Emperor Leo III the Syrian.
He ruled over Byzantine Empire from 717 AD
to 741 AD and completely forbade the venerations of icons.
He ordered widespread destruction of any
such icons that displayed religious themes and persecuted anyone who venerated
them.
That period of deliberate destruction of
their own religious icons and symbols is known as the “First Iconoclasm”, the
word iconoclasm literally translates into “icon-breaking”.
Since the Western Church always staunchly
supported the use of imagery for religious purposes, this only enhanced the
schism between the two sects which then was still unified.
Iconoclasm is not limited to Christianity
but it is followed by those Christians who take the words of Bible and in
particular the Ten Commandments literally.
The second commandment is very clear about
that:
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image”.
Christianity is very lax with respect to
iconoclasm with most sects generating graven images of their gods.
Islam, in general, is far more iconoclastic
than Christianity with Sunni Islam being the most adherent and it is very
evident as we hardly find any imagery of any sort among the followers of
prophet, either at their place of worship or elsewhere.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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