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An Icon as an Image
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. |
 Reverse
Perspective
Understanding icons may be difficult
due to a special way of conveying space and the beings and objects inside
it. We look at pictures with the eyes of a European, and what we see in
them seems to resemble what we see around. 'Verisimilitude' in European
painting is achieved by using linear perspective. |
 Time
in Icon
To be able to understand icons
it is necessary to know how people of the Middle Ages perceived and understood
the concept of time. The difference between the concept of time in Western
Europe and that in Byzantium was formed in the Renaissance period, when
Europe, unlike Byzantium, acquired the new attitudes and outlook towards
the world. |
Light in Icon
If we speak about icons it is necessary
to mention "the lightful Grace of Christ". An orthodox doctrine
- isichasm - found expression in icon-painting. God is unknowable in His
essence but He shows Himself through His Grace - the divine energy is
effused by Him into the world. According to St. Gregory Palama (1296-1359)
Jesus Christ is the Light, and his teaching is the enlightenment of people. |
 Symbolism
of Colors in Icon
An introductory discussion on
the symbolism of colors in icons Byzantines considered that the meaning
of art is beauty. They painted icons that shined with metallic gold and
bright colors. In their art each color had its place and value. Colors
- whether bright or dark - were never mixed but always used pure. In Byzantium,
color was considered to have the same substance as words, indeed each
color had its own value and meaning. |
How Were the Icons Painted
 Icon-painting
in Old Russia was a sacred profession. On the one hand, conforming to
the canon impoverished the creative process since the iconography of an
image was strictly prescribed. But on the other hand it forced a painter
to focus all his skill on the essence of his painting. Traditions affected
not only iconography but also materials, on which icons were painted,
priming substances, methods of preparing surfaces for painting, dye making
techniques, and painting sequence. |
 Rediscovery
of Icon in the XX c.
The Life of an icon was no longer
than a hundred years. Then the image on it grew dark because drying oil
changed its colour, and it got covered with soot from the candles. Therefore,
the image was renovated: New ones were applied upon hardly visible outlines.
In the XX century, when restoration techniques became more perfect, suddenly
bright, pure colours showed through under the old layer of drying oil.
|
 Iconostasis
The iconostasis is quite a solid
screen stretching from the northern to the southern wall of a church,
whereon icons are arranged in a predefined order. This screen divides
the Altar from the church's middle part. There are three doors in the
iconostasis. The central doors are called the Holy Doors. And a man who
is not in a Holy order is not permitted to enter them. |
 Icons
of Theotokos
There is no other subject in
Christian iconography, exclusive of the Savior, that has been painted
so often and with so much love, as the image of the Most Holy Theotokos.
Iconographers of all times tried to impart to the face of Theotokos as
much beauty, gentleness, dignity and grandeur as they could imagine. Russian
icons always show the Mother of God grieving. |
