Visual Chronotypes of Christian Art: Operationalizing Sacred Temporality

This working paper establishes a comprehensive art-historical and philosophical framework for operationalizing sacred temporality as a quantifiable, machine-readable visual structure. By contrasting the Eastern Orthodox theological emphasis on kairos (timeless, eternal presence) with the Western Catholic progression toward chronos (linear, historical narrative), this paper lays the theoretical groundwork for Digital Humanities methodologies. We outline how classical visual elements - such as frontality, inverse perspective, omnidirectional luminance, and compositional stasis - can be systematically extracted and measured using computer vision pipelines (OpenCV). Ultimately, we propose a methodology that reframes historical religious artworks not as passive illustrations, but as active computational chronotypes. This working paper forms part of an ongoing research programme on time as an organizing principle of visual form in art. It presupposes a broader theoretical foundation developed in D. S. Georgieva, The Problem of Time in Painting (Zenodo, 2026), DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21325537, published subsequently for reasons of editorial timing; readers seeking the classical art-historical and philosophical grounding for the claims made here are encouraged to consult that paper first.