Travelling to Byzantium: Mikhail Vrubel and the Urgency of a Byzantine Renaissance

Abstract

In this article, we examine certain aspects of the work of the influential yet little-studied artist Mikhail Vrubel. Active at the end of the 19th century, Vrubel came to view Russo-Byzantine art as an important precursor of an anti-realist and proto-abstract pictorial tradition that seemed to foreshadow his own modernist innovations. Breaking away from the photographic precision of the dominant realist school, Vrubel emphasized the material quality of paint and the flatness of the canvas, creating a visual syntax that was characteristically modernist.