THE LOCUS SANCTITATIS

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR APPROACHING LOCUS SANCTITATIS
If Leibniz’s pronouncement that space constitutes the order in which things coexist is adopted, it could be surmised that the order of things’ succession depends on time. Humans of the pre-industrial era, faced with time in its cyclical dimension of birth and decay (annual cycle, Christian calendar of saints and martyrs as experienced in the cyclical time of Church life), viewed in a continuum both the unity of Church tradition (a flowing and yet frozen reality) and also the meaning of salvation, formed within the structured context of the Church as an existential entity / dimension of co-existence, a catholic a priori of the linear meaning of Christian eschatology. The Christian locus sanctitatis (place of sanctity) is the place par excellence in which the dimension of eschatological time is manifested (the emplacement of time in human consciousness in its emotive, self-aware, aesthetic and political dimensions); it is the historical place where the limitations of time are experienced (the biological fact of life’s termination), ridden with values, anxieties, fears and hopes in the prospect of the eschatological ‘non-historicity’ of life beyond death or of the atemporal dimension of the future.
The locus sanctitatis constitutes a cultural narrative reserve that guides towards identity-building and injects the relationship between the believer and the world surrounding him with meaning. Architecture and art convert space into mediated place by creating historical connections. Furthermore, through the multiplying and accumulative materialisations or distinguishing realisations that they bring to place, architecture and art construct an identity of multiple narratives that makes place a product of the interaction between connections and practices which shift with time. The locus sanctitatis aims towards restructuring the temporalising factuality of the past within the present while attempting to construct a psychological action, a sort of incarnation, of sacred history. This ‘psychologising’ of history, connected with iconography, becomes an ontological foundation – an ontological memory – for ascribing meaning to the transcendence of salvation. The ontological dimension of locus sanctitatis should not be ignored: it refers to a representationability of God that substitutes a locus sanctitatis for God’s absence. This memory-driven ‘situatedness,’ occurring through the use of images in the believer’s synchronicity, is achieved by the locus sanctitatis; its preservation is a sound substitute for the absence of the past in the believer-subject’s present.
However, while studying the locus sanctitatis as a place incorporating a historical representationability (which actually manipulates the ‘visionary-imaginary’ relationship between the subject and the afterlife), we should not forget the historical dimension of its realisability, both artistic and ritual, that is defined by five basic principles: mnemonic recording (filing-depositing of historical information and memory function), emplacement (situating historical memory in place) and temporalisation (bridging the gap between past and present) of the historical fact, identity-building and narrationability. In this way, the church becomes the ritual milieu of a historiographic realisability: its iconographical programme constitutes a mediated form of representationability that performs the role of an eye-witness of certain historical acts and practices. The representational material is perceived as a communication code subject to an accumulative process of historical documentation and becomes part of a narrative practice as the spatial and temporal centre of a self-awareness tool, a sort of identity which experientially reconnects the believer-subject with the historical past and situates the artistic act within a perspective of salvation. In this way, the locus sanctitatis wields catholic power to make the subject conform to a set salvational framework.
Interpreting the art of painting in the locus sanctitatis as a narrative creates an authority of time (and memory) and constructs an imagery of salvation. In this sense, the artistic production as a source of historical meaning of salvation holds the place of a post-narrative. Cultural objects (icons, wall-paintings) in their dimension as material manifestations of the social, disclose a typology of stylistic narratives or tendencies (discernible realisabilities) which refers to materialisations of specific cultural milieus or places, to identifications and transformations of the material that represents distinct modes of action and also to the material’s relation with an external factor, its temporal itinerary through space. The material manifestations of the social, as experiences of connecting to the world and of being able to correlate, undergo a transformation from multiple conventions and varied constituents of the way of living (religiosity, education and culture, cultural affiliations, creative abilities) and construct criteria for the self-fulfilment of the work of art and of the anthropological context it creates. A foundation of knowledge is created, inseparable from the context and the structures of the subjective experience that cultivates it. However, there is no way we can describe the material cultural resource if we eschew reference to the dynamic network of relationships of the social reality that produces and preserves it. Therefore, dealing with our material inevitably becomes a question of elements coexisting and of an inherited tradition (what could be termed ‘identity’) coinciding in symbiotic mode with the external actuality of the actor-creator (what could be termed ‘tendency and necessity to correlate’).
At the same time, locus sanctitatis serves the established power of the Church around which an ideology and a militant psychology against a shared religious enemy and the tide of events connected with Ottoman domination is created within the context of the Ottoman Empire. It also serves dogmatic intransigence within contexts conducive to compromise and religious renunciation under the pressure of overwhelming political power. Therefore, locus sanctitatis is used to gather the psychological and social constituents of a commitment to an eschatological future rather than to the present of powerful lay patrons. This is why Church dogmatics and its iconographical documentation never ceased to argue in the name of an authenticity abundantly disseminated by Christian martyrdom – quite the contrary; in this way resistance practices were fostered and this very authenticity was protected. The artistic institutionalisation of martyrdom was the most substantial form of Church dogmatics since it necessitated the belief in someone else’s action, in an invisible otherness, and turned it into a tangible situation. Therefore, in iconography (a geometrically delimited place with perceptible substance) various realisable paradigms of resistance are imprinted alongside a providential element, offering their own post-language of reference for the believer-monk; one moves from the visibility of reality into the invisibility of expected salvation through faith.
Another reference to the way the visual material of locus sanctitatis is used has to take into consideration the quantitative and qualitative shifts that divert the operation of the Byzantine ‘canon’ by applying a plethora of variants which transform given formulas of the ‘act of painting’ through time. These complex mechanisms have to be clarified. They are connected with identified changes in the ways the Byzantine ‘canon’ was used, altered, transformed and transmuted, a process interwoven since the 17th century with a ‘folk’ version of the ‘act of painting.’ Through this, the structures and coherence of the Byzantine ‘canon’ begin to be questioned and improvisation practices are involved; they are organised through a novel network of forged relationships and newly interpreted traditional artistic structures, just as the earlier ‘academic’ tradition performed this role through subsidiary painter groups dedicated to its propagation. In this way an artistic idiom is created through common trends in taste and perceptions observable in a large number of monuments. In trying to delineate the cultural characteristics of an artistic production in its affinity with social situations, a distinction has to be made as to the degree of change that events bring upon the practitioners of painting, especially in relation to the appropriation of their creativity as this is made manifest while grouping the material and defining its discernible aspects. This change enables them to express things while surrendering to a ‘folk familiarity.’ In the ways the ‘act of painting’ is exercised according to the Byzantine canon, certain qualitative and quantitative changes do exist with relation to certain periods of time. The analysis at hand tries to decode the use of those specific rules that define distinctive features of every period, bearing in mind that the act of painting is a manifestation of accumulations within the ‘canon’ and is defined by historical reality.
Therefore, behind ‘style’ we should see homogenous systems of reference with shared and integral characteristics which adjust, transform and change the ‘canon.’ Style is also connected with the artistic project which, in its turn, relates to the way in which a painter appropriates artistic production or, alternatively, to the ways in which he uses the variable of his artistic system (drawing, colour). In this analysis of locus sanctitatis we should always bear in mind that painting may reclaim its surfaces but it also enlivens its limits since it expands beyond the unequivocalness of its geometricising as a narrative act, into which modern practices are incorporated, practices that organise both the social and the artistic space. Artistic production constitutes a focus of energy that keeps alive its connection with the time variable within Byzantine art evolution but also with the symbolic approximations and distancings of the artistic milieu in its applied and symbolic aspects. Consequently, the locus sanctitatis is artistically constituted through a system of endogenous and exogenous elements which correspond to immutabilities and regularities but also organise coexistences or conflicts. These create a multifocal plane defined by transformations, the result of interactions and rapprochements of the ‘anthropological places’ with which it comes into direct or indirect contact.
In conclusion, the cultivation of a style (manifested as a narrative act and distinct for its polysemy and variability) is directly connected to the culturally constituted and defined taste of its creator. This taste is symbolic capital and as such it transforms through the multiple conventions of incentives and culture (artistic sensitivity and the draughtsmanship being just two of them). In its turn, the geometric space of the painting’s surface (a specific artistic spatiality mediated through the creator’s experience) becomes an anthropological space rooted as an icon or wall-painting in the locus sanctitatis. In this sense, within the locus sanctitatis many spatial experiences (artistic narratives) coexist. The loca sanctitatis are transformed into narrative spaces of different styles, capable of structuring regularities (mannerisms) of the act of painting with shared aesthetic principles and distinct characteristics while cultivating an artistic promise of salvation.

Στην πολιτισμική προσέγγιση που αφορά στον «τόπο της αγιότητας» σκοπός είναι να διαφανούν αυτό που ο Michel De Certeau θα ονόμαζε «στιγμιαίες διαμορφώσεις θέσεων» ή πρακτικές που συγκροτούν ένα ολόκληρο σύστημα συμβολοποιημένων σημείων. Στην αποκρυπτογράφηση της ιεροποίησης του τόπου και του μετασχηματισμού του σε επιτελεστικού τόπου συγκροτούμενου από σχεσιακές εγγύτητες ή συγκρούσεις, η επιχειρούμενη ανάγνωση καθορίζεται από την ένταξη του ανθρώπου σε ένα πολιτισμικό περιβάλλον και σε συγκεκριμένες πρακτικές αναγώγιμες στην «παραγωγή τόπων» που συνδέονται με το χριστιανικό σωτηριολογικό «παράδειγμα».
Μέσω της προσέγγισης του «τόπου της αγιότητας» καταφαίνεται μια διαδικασία που αποκαλύπτει τον τρόπο συγκρότησης των μηχανισμών ενός «αυτοκαταναγκαστικού χώρου», ο οποίος συγκεντρώνει όλα τα πλεονεκτήματα μιας τεχνικότητας που αφορά στην αξιοποίηση των συμβολοποιημένων στοιχείων του παρελθόντος σε ζητήματα θανάτου και σωτηρίας, αλλά και δογματικής νομιμοποίησής τους. Αυτή η ανάγνωση του πολιτισμικού υλικού είναι πολλαπλά χρήσιμη για την ανάδειξη της μικροϊστορίας, εντός της οποίας λειτουργούν τα συστήματα των πολιτισμικών αναπαραστάσεων. Ο «τόπος της αγιότητας» δημιουργεί ένα ευρύτατο πολιτισμικό περιβάλλον που αποσκοπεί στην οργάνωση μιας χρονικότητας του παρόντος χρόνου και η χρήση της θρησκευτικής του εικονογραφίας συνιστά πράξη επί της σωτηρίας, επέχει «τόπο» του σωτηριολογικού ενεργήματος, και έτσι ο «τόπος της αγιότητας» αποτελεί στην πραγματικότητα τη βάση που διαχειρίζεται ως ίδιον, το οποίο αποσπάται από ένα εξωτερικό, εχθρικό και αλλότριο, περιβάλλον, τις σχέσεις με την υπερβατικότητα του θεού.
Εάν κατά τον Leibniz ο χώρος συνιστά την τάξη της συνύπαρξης των πραγμάτων, θα μπορούσε να ειπωθεί πως στο χρόνο εναποτίθεται η τάξη της διαδοχής τους. Ο προνεωτερικός χριστιανός άνθρωπος, αντιμέτωπος με τον κυκλικό χρόνο της γέννησης και της φθοράς (κύκλος του ενιαυτού, χριστιανικό αγιολόγιο και μαρτυρολόγιο όπως βιώνονται στον κύκλιο λειτουργικό χρόνο της ζωής της εκκλησίας), βίωνε σε μια συνέχεια όχι μόνο την ενότητα της εκκλησιαστικής παράδοσης, αλλά και έβλεπε να διαμορφώνεται μέσα στο δομημένο περιβάλλον της εκκλησίας το νόημα της σωτηρίας.
Ο χριστιανικός «τόπος της αγιότητας» αποτελεί τον κατ’ εξοχήν τόπο όπου μαρτυρείται η διάσταση του εσχατολογικού χρόνου-η χωροποίηση του χρόνου στην ανθρώπινη συνείδηση στη συγκινησιακή, αυτογνωσιακή, αισθητική, πολιτική της υπόσταση-, ο ιστορικός τόπος όπου αντιλαμβάνεται κανείς το πεπερασμένο της χρονικότητας (το βιολογικό γεγονός διακοπής της ζωής), διαμεσολαβημένης με αξίες, αγωνίες, φόβους και ελπίδες, στην προοπτική της εσχατολογικής «αν-ιστορικότητας» τού είναι μετά θάνατον ή της α-χρονικής διάστασης του μέλλοντος.

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