When we compare Baroque art with Byzantine and post-Byzantine painting, we immediately encounter two profoundly different understandings of the human person, of light, and ultimately of existence itself. The distinction is not merely stylistic. It is theological and anthropological.

Baroque painting begins from naturalistic portraiture and naturalistic landscape painting, yet it develops them in a centrifugal manner. One sees this clearly in the works of Peter Paul Rubens, where bodies, horses, garments, gestures, and landscapes explode outward toward the periphery of the canvas. The space becomes dramatic and unstable. Everything tends toward expansion, movement, emotional excess, and theatricality. The eye is constantly drawn away from the center.

This movement is not accidental. It reflects the fundamental presupposition of Western post-Renaissance culture: individualism. The Baroque painter often portrays the nobleman, the courtier, the ruler. The person stands before us not in communion with others but as an autonomous individual demanding attention. Even the enormous wigs, luxurious garments, embroidered coats, and zig-zag folds of fabric participate in this outward thrust. The garments do not merely clothe the body; they magnify presence, power, and spectacle. The composition itself becomes centrifugal because the anthropology behind it is centrifugal. The individual seeks assertion rather than communion.

For this reason, Baroque art often suffers from what Christos Yannaras once described so insightfully as “εντυπωσιασμός”—the pursuit of impression and effect. The goal becomes not communion but astonishment. One seeks to overwhelm the viewer emotionally, visually, psychologically. In many ways this spirit has extended far beyond painting into politics, culture, public life, and even contemporary civilization itself, where spectacle frequently replaces truth and impression replaces relationship.

Byzantine painting proceeds from entirely different premises. In Byzantine and post-Byzantine art, everything begins from the person, but the person understood not as isolated individual, rather as hypostasis in communion. The center of gravity of light falls upon the face: upon the eyes, the nose, the central axis of the body. The garments are not painted in order to impress us with luxury or virtuosity. Their so-called embroideries are not decorative embellishments intended to seduce the viewer. They are what we may call “light-embroideries” (φωτοκεντήματα), luminous brushstrokes—ψιμυθιές—which reveal the presence of divine illumination.

The light in Byzantine painting possesses theological meaning. It is not natural sunlight. It is the love of the Father shining through the Son toward creation. The saints stand side by side upon the walls of the church, illuminated by this ontological light. Each face receives the light personally and uniquely. The luminous highlights on the face do not isolate the saint egocentrically; they reveal the irreducible uniqueness of each person within communion. A row of martyrs standing together may each possess distinct luminous accents upon the face, yet all remain gathered into a common harmony. The structure of light itself—what we might call a “photostructure” (φωτοδομή)—creates stability, communion, and relational presence.

Thus Byzantine painting is centripetal. Its movement gathers rather than disperses. It draws the faithful not toward spectacle but toward relationship. The saints do not impose themselves upon us through domination or theatricality; they invite us into communion.

Yet here we encounter a paradox. The centripetal structure of Byzantine light remained fundamentally unchanged from Byzantine into post-Byzantine painting. Unlike Western art, it did not generate an internal historical evolution of comparable magnitude. This fact suggests that Byzantine painting contains an intrinsic tension of its own. The more intensely it emphasizes the externally given divine illumination of the face, the more it risks distancing itself from the historical development of painting as such.

And yet Byzantine art possessed immense secrets of color, line, rhythm, and form. Its schools became treasures recognized throughout the world. Indeed, when Byzantine artistic principles passed into Italy through figures such as Cimabue and Giotto, they helped generate the very beginnings of Western pictorial renewal. The Madonnas of the early Italian painters still carry within them the memory of Byzantine iconography.

But the most fascinating synthesis appeared later in the person of El Greco. Doménikos Theotokópoulos left Crete and journeyed through Venice and Rome to Toledo, carrying within himself both Byzantine iconography and Western artistic experience. In him something extraordinary occurred: the sharp opposition between Byzantine and Baroque art was softened.

El Greco created compositions filled with dramatic movement, instability, upward dynamism, and emotional intensity—features clearly related to the Baroque spirit. Yet the faces of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints remain profoundly Byzantine. Their illumination remains centripetal. Their gaze remains iconographic. El Greco became, in essence, a Byzantine iconographer who “Baroquized” without surrendering the theological heart of the icon.

In this sense, El Greco handed us a torch. He revealed the possibility of a bridge between Byzantine and Baroque art, between centripetal and centrifugal movement, between communion and dramatic expression. Yet this path has not truly been explored. We have not yet fully understood or developed the synthesis that he opened before us.

Through this entire journey—from the tenth and eleventh centuries to the eighteenth and nineteenth, through the influence of El Greco upon Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso—we arrive finally at ourselves, the painters of today, who have received this fertile proposal of El Greco. It remains now to be seen how these elements will be used and transformed in the near future.

Perhaps the future of sacred painting still waits there, somewhere between the stillness of Byzantium and the trembling dynamism of the modern world.