Icon and Ballad

Icons and ballads are not in the mainstream of European painting and literature, but they have a direct appeal to us which belies their remote origins. Icons originated in the Middle East around the sixth century AD, but the ones we are familiar with, like the Virgin of Vladimir, derive from the Byzantine Christian empire and date from the eleventh century onwards. This was a pivotal era, the time when Western and Eastern churches split, and when the races of northern Europe were being converted to Christianity. Strongly influenced by the Greek Orthodox Church, the tradition of icon painting spread, following these conversions, through Slavic north-east Europe, reaching its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

At the opposite, north-west end of the continent ballads originating in the British Isles (as in the collections of Percy, Scott and Child) are vaguely dated to the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but many obviously have an earlier gestation. The ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” has Scots lords sailing to Norway to collect a bride for their king, an episode dated to the thirteenth or sixteenth century. This reminds us that the “English” ballad tradition was not entirely insular, having connections with Norse and Teutonic folk tales, and with France through the Arthurian and other cycles. The eerie goings-on in Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter”, for example, replicate the witches’ sabbath and Walpurgis night ceremonies once common throughout Europe. Burns’s poetry shows that remote folk motifs were part of his living culture.

Both icons and ballads are outside the central tradition of European high culture going back to the Enlightenment, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the Renaissance eras, even though they may be contemporaneous in time with these. Daniel Corkery has explained the consequences of this in his book The Hidden Ireland, on native Gaelic poetry:

The Renaissance whitened every well-known national culture in Europe to something of a common tone. The watered-down Hellenism of the Renaissance deprived each of these national cultures of something of the homeliness, the raciness, the intensity, that previously were in them … That common flavour for which the Renaissance is responsible was once an alien note in European literature—“a strange, a rich, a savage food” … It is the original note that we now find strange and rich and savage.

In his study of European attitudes to mortality, The Hour of Our Death, Phillipe Ariès reveals that between the ninth and thirteenth centuries the Catholic Church, as the centre of Western Christendom, homogenised the liturgy of the Mass, which up till then had local variants, such as the Gallican one. When the Roman and Byzantine churches split in 1054, the cultural rituals of Orthodoxy were just one of a number of earlier cultural expressions rendered less familiar to us.

Different religious worldviews are embodied in icons and ballads, one Christian, the other misleadingly termed “pagan” in Christian nomenclature, but in fact an expression of earlier cyclical forms of religion with a very different attitude to death. Icons depict the Christian aspiration to a transcendent realm where all earthly anxieties and yearnings are resolved on a higher plane. Portraits of saints are stylised, hierarchic and almost one-dimensional, without movement, perspective or shadow, to convey they exist in a celestial realm beyond ours. Perfected forms of visible earthbound images are employed to signify the invisible world beyond; sumptuous enamelled golds, browns and reds create the atmosphere of a kingly palace. The ethereal visages and gravitas of saints announce their redeemed state.

It is the intensity of the images, not surprise nor novelty, that captures us in icons—we know the “big picture” scenario beforehand. Old and New Testament stories, particularly the events leading up to and after Christ’s crucifixion, were familiar to believers. Christ’s transfiguration, His resurrection, Our Lady’s assumption and Christ ruling in Heaven are key foci, all highlighting movement to a domain which transcends ours. But with ballads we don’t know the storyline from the start, or how things will turn out. Both icon and ballad plunge us immediately into their subject matter—foreground is all. Minimal context or explanation is provided. Both work by repetition of main themes and standard forms, but have some minimal fluidity, as details of the content can slowly change with repeated retellings.

The painter of an icon stands at a distance, in awe of his subject. The approach is rational and dispassionate, whereas in ballads it is subjective and disturbed. The world of ballads is one of earthly conflicts, family feuds, realms in chaos, natural disasters, cycles of revenge, and doomed love affairs—strife without closure, blind heroism, tragic outcomes. Death, or at least a death wish, is the common solution for tensions which have no satisfactory resolution in life. The stoic, chorus-like resolve, “What can’t be cured must be endured”, is the only provisional standby available. The hope is of serial immortality—the tribe survives but not the individual.

The otherworld of ballads is not heaven above or hell below, as in the Christian cosmography, but a lateral badland (still faintly caught in our word outlandish) or faerie land, an adjacent realm, where malevolent sprites and demonic forces from another dimension can seduce the unwary into surrendering their human attributes. In “Thomas the Rhymer”, the first ballad in Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of Ballads, a richly dressed lady is mistakenly thought by the hero to be “Mary, Queen of Heaven”, but she informs him she is the “Queen o’ fair Elfland”, before beguiling him away with promises of bliss for seven years, during which “true Thomas on earth was never seen”.

Though icons and ballads flourished at opposite ends of the continent, they were not entirely disconnected in place. The eastern pictorial tradition reached as far as the Ravenna cathedral in northern Italy in the fifth and sixth centuries. Some eastern saints like George and Nicholas migrated to the Western hemisphere. Along the southern rim of the continent the Middle Eastern basilica style of Romanesque church architecture reached as far as southern France, and as a result co-existed in place with the troubadour love ballads. The Black Virgins of this region may have a Byzantine or Crusader origin. Along the northern rim of the continent icon painting moved as far as altar decorations in the wooden churches of Norway, itself part, through common Anglo-Saxon and Viking connections, of the English ballad sphere. The farther icons moved from their Greek Byzantine roots, the more local folk motifs crept into their iconography, thus moving them thematically closer to the ballads. Europe had a high culture centred on Italy and the Rhine–Danube continuum, surrounded by a ballad-and-icon linkage at its peripheries which kept alive earlier, more direct forms of artistic expression, as described by Daniel Corkery. W.B. Yeats was, uniquely, interested in both Irish folkways and the glories of Byzantium.

Both icons and ballads are elemental, bare, stripped down. In our more variegated and anxious world, we yearn for clear-cut insights into human motivation, things revealed in their skeletal form, striking truths easily occluded today. In both cases a community is expressing its values, distilling an essence of itself, creating a permanent memorial to its existence. In both cases the art works are not individually created nor individually received, but intended for a congregation or for a cèilidh-like gathering. The fairytale opening “Once upon a time” takes its events outside a specific time and place, joining happenings of long ago to artists recreating them in the present. The remote past comes alive in the reciting of them—no gap in time exists.

In both cases the creator is anonymous, performing on behalf of the community. The idiosyncrasies of his own personality are not important or even present. Unlike the modern artist he does not seek to express himself, to create something new, to break with the conventions, to be iconoclastic. He knows that he has to continue what has gone beforehand, to uphold a given way of expression. In the icon tradition the image of the Christ’s face is called a mandylion, for example the impression on the cloth with which Veronica wiped Christ’s face, the Edessa image and the Turin shroud. This image of the Saviour is said not to be made by human hands. Monks who painted the icons were deemed to be so imbued with religious sensibility that their work emerged through a mystical process of divine osmosis—the artist was simply the instrument of this transfer. The German concept bessonenheit means “the artist has not so much created something almost divine, as that it has already been there waiting to be uncovered, to be realised”. Ballads similarly have a voice which speaks in a generalising tone, bringing to the surface deep memories of the race.

We receive only fragments of the full icon and ballad traditions. Individual portrait icons, the ones we are most familiar with, were placed in a corner of a home as a small shrine; personal intercessions to members of the Holy Family and the saints could be addressed through them. But in a church such icons were only part of a much larger ensemble. Rows of icons in a prescribed hierarchical order were attached to the altar screen which separated the congregation from the holy space occupied by the priest. In addition icons were hung on church walls and painted as frescoes and murals. These included narrative scenes, such as the Day of Judgment over which Christ Pantocrator presides, with the saved rising to heaven, the damned forced through the gaping jaws of hell, and the Slavs’ earthly foes—Turks, Jews, Germans, Tartars and others—partitioned off to one side. Such didactic images formed part of the larger Christian story.

Similarly each of the ballads which have survived depicts one episode only, integral in itself but also a snapshot of a larger whole. Some are part of song cycles, as with the Arthurian tales, troubadour songs, Norse sagas and the various lays of France. With Scots Border ballads we come across repeated motifs, like the wife exhorting her husband to battle or the mother interrogating her son. The ballads have standard stanzas which can be employed in multiple contexts, and which point to deeper subterranean patterns. Love is disabling and disappointing:

O waly, waly, but love be bonny,

A little time while it is new,

But when ’tis auld it waxeth cauld,

And fades away like the morning dew.

The close kin of clan heroes have to cope with tragedy:

And lang, lang may the maidens sit,

Wi’ their goud kaims in their hair,

A’ waiting for their ain dear loves,

For them they’ll see nae mair.

The icon portraits and the ballad texts are incomplete without their expression in song—the liturgical chants of Orthodox ritual and the singing of Border ballads immeasurably deepen the impression they make.

As the centuries passed the set icon and ballad forms expanded their scope. In the east this happened in Russia in the decades around 1400 when the school of Andrei Rublev flourished. His famous painting The Trinity, with its fluidity, graceful rhythm, earthly ambience and lightness (in both senses of the word) follows the rules but also elevates them, as he shifts the icon form into the mainstream of European art. And it is his distinctive style—the artist is no longer hidden, his personality and signature style are impressed upon his work.

In the medieval English lyric the same development is apparent. “The Unquiet Grave”, which cannot be precisely dated, moves the ballad form into the realm of poetry. A young girl sits on the grave of her recently deceased loved one, believing she is doing her duty to him by weeping and mourning because, focusing on herself, she is unable to get over her loss. She still understandably yearns for his presence: “For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips / And that is all I seek.” But he parries her apparently modest demand: “If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips / Your time will not be long.” This changes the nature of her grieving from its heavy, cloying imagery to a less self-regarding and more expansive tone:

’Tis down in yonder garden green

Love, where we used to walk

The fairest flower that ere was seen

Is withered to a stalk.

Here the poetry, as with Rublev, catches a lighter and more lyrical note. The final consolation of the departed to his loved one—“So make yourself content, my love / Till God calls you away”—takes up the previous stoic refrain, “What can’t be cured / Has to be endured”, but amplifies it by allowing it to flower on a new level. The ballad mentality is now released from being trapped in a round of its own self-defeating assumptions. The calm rejoinder of the deceased lover, influenced by Christian belief, has overcome the fatal symbiosis between love and death characteristic of tribal societies.