Iconography & Sacred Art
13 topics
EssentialIconography & Sacred ArtTheology of IconsIcons are not mere religious art: they are 'theology in color,' windows into the heavenly reality. The veneration of icons is grounded in the Incarnation: because God became visible in Christ, it is possible and proper to depict Him. 'He who has seen Me has seen the Father' (John 14:9). The honor paid to the image (eikon) passes to the prototype (prototypon).ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtChrist Pantocrator (Icon Type)The most important and widespread icon of Christ: depicted as ruler and judge of all (Pantocrator = 'Almighty'). Christ is shown frontally, holding the Gospel in His left hand and blessing with His right. In the Sinai icon His face is asymmetric, often read as one side merciful, the other judging. Usually placed in the central dome of the church and on the iconostasis. The Sinai Pantocrator (6th c.) is the oldest known example.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtHagia SophiaThe Great Church of Constantinople, dedicated to the Holy Wisdom of God, which is Christ. Justinian built it in five years and dedicated it in 537, after the church before it burned in the Nika riots; its architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, raised a dome that Procopius said seemed to hang from heaven on a golden chain. The dome fell in 558 and was raised again higher. For nine centuries it was the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the model of Orthodox worship: its rite became the rite of the whole Church, and in it the envoys of Prince Vladimir did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. The Crusaders plundered it in 1204. On 29 May 1453 it became a mosque, and in time its mosaics were plastered over; it was made a museum in 1934, when many were uncovered, and a mosque again in 2020, over the protests of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and of Orthodox Churches everywhere.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtIconoclasmThe century and more in which Byzantine emperors made war on the icons. Leo III began it in the 720s, Constantine V drove it further and had it confirmed by the council of Hieria in 754, and monks suffered most: St Stephen the New was killed in 765. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, meeting at Nicaea in 787 under the Empress Irene and St Tarasius, restored the icons, but Leo V banned them again in 815, and St Theodore the Studite led the resistance from exile. The Empress Theodora and St Methodios restored them for good in 843, the Triumph of Orthodoxy still kept on the first Sunday of Lent. The argument was about Christ: if the Word became flesh, He can be depicted, and to refuse the image is to doubt the Incarnation. St John of Damascus put it plainly: I do not venerate matter, I venerate the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake. The honour given to the image, the council taught with St Basil, passes to the one it shows, and worship belongs to God alone.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe Cross (Symbol & Object)The primary symbol of Orthodox Christianity. Several forms: Byzantine cross (with slanted footrest), Russian cross (three-bar), Greek cross (equal arms), and processional cross. Present in every Orthodox church, home, and worn by the faithful. The sign of the cross (right to left, three fingers joined for Trinity, two folded for Christ's two natures) is made constantly in prayer and worship.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtRublev's Trinity IconThe most famous Orthodox icon, painted by St. Andrei Rublev (c. 1411-1427) for the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Depicts the three angels who visited Abraham (Genesis 18) as an image of the Holy Trinity. Remarkable for its circular composition suggesting the mutual love (perichoresis) of the Three Persons. A theological masterpiece.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe DeesisChrist enthroned, with the Theotokos on His right and St John the Forerunner on His left, both turned towards Him with their hands raised and their heads inclined. The word means supplication, and the composition is an argument about prayer: the two greatest of those born of women are shown doing the one thing the Church asks them to do, which is to ask. It is the centre of the iconostasis, the row that gives its name to the whole tier, and in a large church that row is extended with the archangels, the apostles and the hierarchs, all inclined the same way. Nobody in the composition looks at the viewer except Christ.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe Eleousa (Tenderness)The Child presses His cheek against His mother’s and she inclines her head to Him, and in most of them she is looking out of the icon rather than at Him, with an expression that is not happiness. The type says two things at once: the Incarnation is real enough for a child to cling, and she already knows. The Vladimir icon, brought from Constantinople to Kiev in the twelfth century and afterwards the palladium of Moscow, is the most famous of them. Where the Hodegetria points, the Eleousa holds, and the two types between them cover most of the Marian icons in any Orthodox church.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe Hodegetria (She Who Shows the Way)The Theotokos holds the Child on one arm and points to Him with the other hand. She is not looking at Him and not looking away from the viewer: she is directing attention, and the gesture is the whole content of the type. The Child is shown as a small man rather than a baby, blessing, holding a scroll. The original hung in the Hodegon monastery at Constantinople, was carried round the walls in processions, and was lost when the city fell. Tradition ascribes the first of them to the Evangelist Luke, which the Church understands as a claim about authority rather than about brushwork.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe Image Not Made by Hands (Mandylion)The cloth on which, by the tradition, Christ left the imprint of His own face and sent it to Abgar the king of Edessa, who was sick. It is the icon the iconodules reached for first in the quarrel over images, because it is an image of Christ that no painter made and that Christ Himself gave, so the argument that an image of God is presumption has to answer it. The cloth was brought from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 and the Church keeps that day. In painting it is always the face alone on a cloth, frontal, with no body, and it is the image traditionally set over the doors of a church or above the royal doors. Feast: August 16.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtTheotokos Icon TypesMajor iconographic types of the Virgin Mary: Hodegetria ('She Who Shows the Way', pointing to Christ), Eleusa/Glykophilousa ('Tenderness', cheeks touching), Platytera ('More Spacious than the Heavens', Christ in her womb, hands raised in prayer), Orans (praying with raised hands). Famous miracle-working icons: Iveron, Kazan, Vladimir, Tinos Megalochari.Iconography & Sacred ArtMajor Icon StylesThe ways icons have been painted within one tradition, every one of them bound by the same faces, the same feasts and the same canon. Byzantium set the forms, from the Macedonian and Komnenian centuries to the Palaiologan painting of the fourteenth, with its movement and its light. Novgorod painted with clear colour and bold line, and Moscow gave the tradition Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev and Dionisy. After 1453 the Cretan painters, Theophanes the Cretan among them, kept the Byzantine manner alive under Venice and taught it to Athos, while Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Georgia each gave it an accent of their own. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries much painting turned toward the naturalism of Western art, and the twentieth century turned it back: Photios Kontoglou in Greece and Leonid Ouspensky in Paris returned to the old models and the old reasons for them.Iconography & Sacred ArtThe Painter’s Manual (Hermeneia)A working handbook compiled on Athos by Dionysius of Fourna around 1730, and the nearest thing the tradition has to a written standard for painting. Half of it is craft: how to prepare a panel, grind pigments, lay gold, build flesh from the dark underpaint upward. The other half is iconography proper, scene by scene, saying who stands where in each feast, what each saint looks like and what his scroll says. It is descriptive rather than legislative, recording what was already done, which is why it is useful and why no council ever had to approve it.