8 - From Religious to Secular Imagery? The Rise of the Image among Christians in Syria and Lebanon in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Summary

Eastern Christians, at least the Melkites and the Maronites from bilād al-Shām (Greater Syria), on whom this chapter focuses, had a tradition of images. This was, on the one hand, the art of the icon that expanded in the Byzantine Empire after the crisis of iconoclasm, with some local particularities. On the other hand, it was the monumental decoration of churches and monasteries, which since ancient times had been covered with frescoes and mosaics. It was also the art of the miniature in manuscripts. Images destined for the public were limited to sanctuaries where they formed part of the decoration, alongside lanterns, mirrors and ostrich eggs. Their place, the themes that they represented and the material figures chosen to appear in them followed very formal rules. They first of all helped to teach the people and to put the faithful in contact with the sacred, while at the same time narrating episodes from the life of Christ, the Virgin, or a saint. When an image was an icon, it had to be consecrated before being placed in a church.

For unknown reasons, this traditional art of religious painting nearly died out in Syria, only surviving as miniatures in manuscripts. The painted decor of churches still visible around the eleventh century for the most part seems to have faded afterwards. In principle, the cult required icons. But these must have been extremely rare, and for the most part they were imported.

From the seventeenth century onwards, there appeared a truly new phenomenon: an explosion of consumption, importation and production of images amongst Eastern Christians. It is this development, linked to the economic and cultural opening of Christian minorities towards Orthodox and Catholic Europe, that we will examine here. One can observe in particular an enormous distribution of religious images from, or inspired by, the West, which had consequences for local production and the use of figurative representations; this encouraged a significant evolution of attitudes, in the same manner as the growth of schools or the spreading consumption of printed books.