https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UCAyaZJHX6Q
Hello everyone. Welcome to the second video I’m making of a drawing for my Patreon drawing series. Last month I made two drawings. I made a drawing of Christ, the famous Christ icon from the Sinai. And I also made an image of Christ enthroned from an early German ivory. And so this month I’m also going to start with another version of Christ enthroned, but this time a Byzantine image. It’s taken from one of the most famous Byzantine ivories, which is known as the Harbaville Triptych. And so what I’m hoping to do, I’m trying to really look into clothing and to see the differences in clothing and the differences of styles. Even looking at the German image we can see that clothing is far more of a pattern, whereas in the Byzantine style we can see how the clothing is more, you know, flowing and has a more natural feeling to it. And so I really want to dive into that and see what the differences are, what the relationships are. And so hopefully that will be an interesting thing to do. Alright? So one of the interesting aspects of the Byzantine image is of course the position of Christ is quite different from the German one. This position, the way that the Christ toga goes around his arm and then under the book is one which will continue to exist until today, though I would say it’s probably not a very important image that’s used now for Christ and glory. And it’s interesting to see how the Byzantines, even in the 10th and 11th century, had really preserved the sense of the Roman toga and understood clearly in a physical way what was happening with the clothing, wherein as the German image, what makes that interesting is there seems to be more of an effort to create these patterns of folds that go down the figure and less of an effort to work out exactly, let’s say physically, what the clothing is doing and how it’s actually laying on the person. And so in a way the Byzantine image is more naturalistic and the German image is more erratic and stylized. And I think it’s important, I think at least for me in the work that I’m doing and the carving that I’m doing, I’m really trying to get the best of both of those. The best of the abstraction and the stylization which is maybe more prominent in the Romanesque and in the Northern images, while preserving the sense, at least the best of what the Byzantine and the Roman tradition had to offer in terms of a play, let’s say, of a musical feeling, of a musical style, of a musical style, of a play, let’s say, of a musical feeling, a flowing feeling in the clothing and in the hair. One of the things I really struggle with the Ivory’s is the faces. I really am not prone to following the types of faces that were used either by the Byzantines or by the Germans. And so I tend to make my, use the clothing quite a bit because I think the clothing is very well resolved and well understood and interesting. But the face, I tend to resort to painted icons and to see how to adapt the best of the painted icons into a carving.