“the eye contemplating beautiful objects, gladdens the heart; that is, the eye which has learned rightly to see, gladdens” (Clem. Al., Paedagogus 3.70.2)
In order to help the Christian aristocrats of Alexandria to make up their minds among the disturbing world of luxury objects, such as embellished drapery, showy dresses, ornamented feminine bodies, Clemens proposes an effective strategy of gazing: governing the eye and thus achieving a right way to see.
Clemens traces the first steps by configuring a visual strategy which represents a central thread in Christian texts. From Clemens to Augustine, from the Cappadocian Fathers to John Damascenus: all these authors consider the control of the eye as a culturally appropriate way of seeing and as a means to re-establish the functionality of art and of the decorative ornaments. This type of approach endorses the common tendency in western thought to privilege the eyes and to furthermore select appropriate images, which are able to lead towards a ‘true’ vision. The viewing strategy of the early Church fathers seems to reach a turning point in the 7th-century A.D. Constantinople. The Council Quinisesto (692) judges every sort of sacred image as unfaithful and misleading. The multiplicity of gazes becomes an object of assault for the iconoclasts (726-843). During the ongoing conflict between the divergent visual strategies of iconodules and iconoclasts emerges an orthodox way of seeing, which triumphs in the emphatic celebration of the return of the Theotokos icon to Hagia Sophia. The triumph of the government of the eyes in the ekphrasis performed by Photius is concomitant with a new social control of the gaze and the homologation of divergent religious practices under the wings of the orthodox faith.
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