Why was the byzantine empire art criticized?

Answer 1

Byzantine art became the subject of the iconoclastic controversy twice (First Iconoclasm, 726-787, and Second Iconoclasm, 814-842. The use of icons (religious images) was opposed by the emperor and the hierarchy of the Eastern (Orthodox) Church. The emperor Leo III and his successors banned the icons. There was widespread destruction of if icons and persecutions of supporters of the veneration of images. Iconoclasm means image-breaking and refers to the deliberate destruction of the religious icons and/or other symbols or monuments of one's own culture, usually for religious or political motives.

The veneration of images had developed among the poor as a means of gaining proximity with Christ, the Virgin or the Saints. Linked to this was the spread of the myth of the Acheiropoieta (icons made without hand); that is, icons which were said to have come into existence miraculously, not created by a human painter. The icons came to be seen as having a spiritual significance of their own, as being sacred, and as possessing miraculous capacities, such as bleeding when attacked, or possessing physical force to defend themselves from infidels. There was also increasing blurring of the distinction between images not made by human hands and images made by human hands. This development was linked to the sense of insecurity which was created by raids into the Byzantine Empire and which created a need among the believers to have access to divine support. Icon veneration became an important part of Eastern (Orthodox) Christian worship.

Iconoclasm was probably an effort by the established Church and the imperial authorities counter this development and to try to reassert some institutional control over popular practice.

The iconoclasts believed that early church had opposed images in worship and wanted to restore this. Theologically, their objections to icons were based on earlier controversies about the two natures of Christ (human and divine). The official church held that the human and the divine were not separate, but were not mixed and remained distinct. The iconoclasts believed that icons were heretical because they could not represent both the divine and the human natures of Jesus at the same time. They argued that an icon which depicted Jesus as purely physical was Nestorianism (the creed of a Christian sect which believed that the human and divine natures of Jesus were separate and which had been condemned as heretical). An icon which depicted Jesus as both human and divine would do so by confusing his two natures into one mixed nature, which they saw as Monophysitism the creed of another Christian sect which was also condemned as heretic - it believed Jesus was the incarnation of a union of the divine and the human and that Jesus had only a single nature which was a synthesis of divine and human into one.