Art and Iconography

Optional Assignments

12. Read the text and make up its outline.

Christian art constitutes an essential element of the Christian religion. Until the 17th century the history of Western art was largely identical with the history of Western ecclesiastical and religious art. During the first three centuries of the Christian Church, however, there was no Christian art, and the church generally resisted it with all its might. Clement of Alexandria, for example, criticized religious (pagan) art in that it encouraged people to worship that which is created rather than the Creator.

About the mid-3rd century an incipient pictorial art began to be used and accepted in the Christian Church but not without fervent opposition in some congregations. Only when the Christian Church became the Roman imperial church under Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century were pictures used in the churches, and they then began to strike roots in Christian popular religiosity.

Later, however, when pictorial art was publicly placed in the service of the church, warnings against this development were voiced by leading theologians. The use of images of the Apostles Paul and Peter as well as of Christ himself were characterized as a pagan custom. Asterius, bishop of Amaseia in Pontus during the late 4th and early 5th centuries, similarly stated in a sermon: Do not picture Christ on your garments. It is enough that he once suffered the humiliation of dwelling in a human body which of his own accord he assumed for our sakes. So, not upon your robes, but upon your soul, carry about his image. Have God always in your hearts, but not in the community house, for it does not become a Christian to expect the elation of his soul from recourse to his eyes and the roaming about of his senses.

The struggle against images was conducted as a battle against "idols" with all the intensity of faith in the oneness and exclusiveness of the imageless biblical God.

The starting point for the development of Christian pictorial art, however, lies in the basic teaching of the Christian revelation itself - namely, the incarnation. The incarnation of the Son of man, the Messiah, in the form of a human being - who was created in the "image of God"--granted theological approval of a sort to the use of images that symbolized Christian truths. Clement of Alexandria, at one point, called God "the Great Artist," who formed humans according to the image of the Logos, the archetypal light of light. The great theological struggles over the use of images within the church during the period of the so-called Iconoclastic Controversy in the 8th and 9th centuries indicate how a new understanding of images emerged on the basis of Christian doctrine. The victory of the supporters of the use of icons is celebrated in the entire Orthodox Church on the first Sunday of Lent as the Feast of Orthodoxy. This new understanding was developed into a theology of icons that still prevails in the Eastern Orthodox Church in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The great significance of images of the saints for the Orthodox faithful is primarily expressed in the cultic veneration of the images within the worship service. Second, it is expressed in the dogmatic fixation of the figures, gestures, and colours in Eastern Church iconic art. In the West, the creative achievement of the individual artist is admired, but Orthodox painting dispenses with the predominance of the individual painter's freely creative imagination. Throughout the centuries the Eastern Church has been content with reproducing certain types of holy images, and only seldom does an individual artist play a predominant role within the history of Orthodox Church painting.

Most Orthodox ecclesiastical artists have remained anonymous. Icon painting is viewed as a holy skill that is practiced in cloisters in which definite schools of painting have developed. In the schools, traditional principles prevail so much that different artist-monks generally perform only certain functions in the production of a single icon. Style motifs - e.g., composition, impartation of colour, hair and beard fashions, and gestures of the figures - are fixed in painting books that contain the canons of the different monastic schools of icon painters. The significance of the image of the saint in the theology, piety, and liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church can be judged historically from the fact that the struggle over holy images within Orthodox Church history brought about a movement whose scope and meaning can be compared only with the Reformation of Luther and Calvin.

Orthodox icon painting is not to be separated from its ecclesiastical and liturgical function. The painting of the image is, in fact, a liturgical act in which the artist-monks prepare themselves by fasting, penance, and consecrating the materials necessary for the painting. Before the finished icon is used, it likewise is consecrated. Not viewed as a human work, an icon (according to 8th- and 9th-century literature) was understood instead as a manifestation of a heavenly archetype. A golden background is used on icons to indicate a heavenly perspective. The icon is always painted two-dimensionally because it is viewed as a window through which worshipers can view the heavenly archetype from their earthly position. A figure in the three-dimensionality of the plastic arts, such as sculpture, would thus be an abandonment of the character of epiphany (appearance).

Ideas of the iconic liturgy dominate the manuals of the Orthodox icon painters. The model of the Christ figure for icon painters was found in an apocryphal writing of the early church - the Letter of Lentulus, which was a legendary letter supposedly written by a certain Lentulus, who was named consul in the 12th year of the emperor Tiberius. As the superior of Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judaea, he by chance was staying in Palestine at the time of the trial of Jesus. In an official report to the Emperor about the trial of Jesus, Lentulus included an official warrant for Jesus with a description of the Christ. This apocryphal description furnished the basic model for the Byzantine Christ type.

The Trinity also may not be represented, except in those forms in which, according to the view of Orthodox church doctrine, the Trinity showed itself in the divine Word of the Old and New Testaments. Early church theology interpreted an Old Testament passage (Genesis 18:1 ff.) as an appearance of the divine Trinity - namely, the visit of the three men with the patriarch Abraham at Mamre in Palestine. Also included in icons of the Trinity are the appearance of the three divine Persons - symbolized as a hand, a man, and a dove - at the baptism of Jesus (Matthew 3:16 ff.) and the Pentecostal scene, in which the Lord, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of God and the Comforter (the Holy Spirit) is sent down to the Apostles in the form of fiery tongues (Acts 2). Another Trinitarian iconic scene is the Transfiguration of Jesus at Mount Tabor (Matthew 17:2).

Icons of Mary were probably first created because of the development of Marian doctrines in the 3rd and 4th centuries. The lack of New Testament descriptions of Mary was compensated by numerous legends of Mary that concerned themselves especially with wondrous appearances of miraculous icons of the mother of God. In Russian and many other Orthodox churches, including the monasteries at Mount Athos, such miraculous mother of God icons, "not made by hands," have been placed where the appearances of the mother of God took place. The consecration liturgy of the icons of saints expresses the fact that the saints themselves, for their part, are viewed as likenesses of Christ. In them, the image of God has been renewed again through the working of salvation of the incarnate Son of God.

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