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Icons cannot be referred to as works of art using the common
meaning of the word. Icons are not paintings. Artists use lines and colour
to represent people and events belonging to material life. Since the Renaissance,
life and nature have been depicted in paintings by reproducing three-dimensional
space on a plane; people, animals, landscapes and things. Even though
the idea is taken from myths it is translated into the language of earthly
images.
Expressionist and abstract art reflects the artist's emotions and sensations
which change and contort the proportions of objects and events and the
colour correlations between them, deform objects completely, or even do
without the objects as images. But even in this case various experiments
with colour and lines do not take the spectator out into the world of
a different nature, different space and time or different values.
This mission in human culture is performed by icons. Icons do not depict
but represent the other world. They represent it using special artistic
techniques that have been discovered over the course of many centuries.
Colour plays a special role in icons because it is a symbolic language
which manifests the light that is inside objects and human faces rather
than their colouring. The source of this light is outside the physical
world. Golden strokes in icons represent this unearthly light, and the
golden background symbolizes the space 'not of this world'. There are
no shadows in icons. In God's Kingdom everything is permeated with this
light.
Icons cannot be looked at as pictures. They represent neither space as
we know it nor events conditioned by ordinary cause and effect relations.
An icon is a window looking onto the world of a different nature but it
is a window open to those only who have spiritual eyesight.
Those who want to come closer to understanding icons need to see them
with the eyes of a believer for whom God is the undoubted reality - a
reality invisibly present everywhere and in every event, an invisible
witness and judge from whose sight it is never possible to hide.
The principles of and methods for creating icons had already been established
for many centuries before Rus took them up. Icon-painting traditions were
brought to Old Rus with Christianity from Byzantium at the end of the
X century.
Byzantine art was religious and obeyed strict rules. Regulation in icon-painting
was the result of long discussion and struggle with iconoclasm. One of
the main factors that caused iconoclasm was Moslem military and ideological
pressure upon Byzantium. In Islam the biblical ban on worshipping idols
among which Moslems rank the cross and icons, became absolute.
In 730 Byzantine Emperor Leo III banned the cult of icons. Before he came
to the throne he had worked in the Empire's eastern provinces and was
under the influence of the bishops of Asia Minor, who were themselves
influenced by Islam and wanted to rid Christianity of all that seemed
material and unspiritual. Many icons, frescoes, and mosaics were destroyed
but this did not stop Christians from venerating them and despite the
fact that they were severely persecuted for it they continued to do so.
Veneration of icons was allowed temporarily at the VII Ecumenical Council
in 787, and finally – in the year 843.
One of the authoritative icon-defenders was the prominent theologian and
politician John of Damascus (about 675-about 750) whose arguments determined
the Council's decisions. John of Damascus taught that the Old Testament
ban on creating images of God was temporary: 'In the old times they never
represented God in images . But now that God has made Himself manifest
in flesh and lived among people, we show the visible God. I do not depict
in lines and colour the Invisible, but the flesh of God that people have
seen…'. John of Damascus wrote that God has come to people in His
Son Jesus Christ. He comes into the world of people and has a human body,
– for we need what is kindred to us' .
The visible does not convey the essence of the incomprehensible God. But
like the body has a shadow, so every original has copies, and in the same
way an 'icon is a reminder'. And as the Holy Scriptures are a verbal image
of the Holy History, so the same image is represented in icons - not verbally,
but in lines and colour.
Therefore an icon – an image – is not a copy of the original,
but a symbol through which one can rise to understanding the Divine. An
icon plays the role of a mystical intermediary between the earthly world
and the world of Heaven. This is how the meaning of icon-painting was
defined.
The VII Ecumenical Council demanded of icon-painters that they strictly
follow iconographic canons in creating icons. Iconographic canons regulate
both the character and the way of reproducing religious episodes and the
images of saints. This is due to the fact that icons bear and keep the
Church Tradition. Therefore breaking iconographic canons is equal to distorting
the Tradition and lapsing into heresy.
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