A Brief Introduction to Icons

“Beauty will save the world,” declares the narrator in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
This is no Keatsian claim that “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ -- that is all / Ye know
on earth, and all ye need to know.” It is, instead, an Orthodox theological claim
rooted in icons. Also in the same novel we hear it said that “there is only one face in
the whole world which is absolutely beautiful” and that “the Incarnation [is] the
epiphany of the Beautiful One.” Icons seek to portray this beauty of God in Jesus
Christ and his saints. “What the Gospel proclaims to us by words,” declared the
Seventh Ecumenical Council of 869-70, “the icon proclaims and renders present for
us by color.” The icon is built on a theology not of representation but of presence:
God’s own splendor radiates through the icon, confronting the worshipper with the
experience of Uncreated Light; it is not an image that one looks at in order to discern
an earthly representation or imitation of the Holy.

As such, an icon is the virtual opposite of a painting. The latter is an expression

of the artist’s own subjective perspective on the world, an attempt to portray or reflect
the visible universe as he sees it. Even cubist and abstract expressionist works are still
paintings in this sense. An icon, by contrast, is the product of a long Tradition that
has nothing to do with the artist’s own genius or ideas, their intuitions or emotions,
their creativity or imagination. It is based on carefully proportioned geometric lines,
on symbolic gestures, on fixed color correspondences—all of which have been
elaborately laid down over centuries of practice. These sacred canons serve as guides
and safeguards to guarantee both spiritual continuity and doctrinal unity. As the
Council of Nicaea decreed in 787: “Only the technical aspect of the work depends on
the [iconographer]; its design, its disposition, its composition depend quite clearly on
the Holy Fathers [i.e., the theologians and bishops of the church].”

This means that icons have comparatively few subjects: the patriarchs and
prophets of the Old Testament; the evangelists and apostles of the New Testament;
the angels and archangels; the saints of all ages; John the Baptist and the Virgin
Mother (Theotokos: the Bearer of God), and especially Christ himself. Yet the Holy
Trinity is rarely portrayed, since neither the Father nor the Spirit became incarnate. In
addition, icons depict the various feasts of the church year, from the Nativity of the
Baptist to the Raising of Lazarus. The Twelve Great Feasts receive special attention:
four for the Mother of God (the Nativity of the Virgin, the Presentation of Mary in
the Temple, the Annunciation, and the Dormition [Mary’s passage into eternal life via
sleep]); six for Christ (the Nativity, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, his
Baptism or Theophany, the Transfiguration, the Entry into Jerusalem, and the
Ascension); plus two devoted to Pentecost and the Exaltation of the Cross.

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 Already by the fourth or fifth century, these iconic subjects and models had
become fixed: the posture of hands in supplication, the martyrs holding a cross, the
proper clothing and the specified colors. The most famous of the iconographic
manuals was set down by a monk of Mount Athos named Dionysius of Fourna in the
17th century. Yet iconographers are far more than servile copyists: they seek rather to
perfect the art forms that have been established by their carefully crafted attention to
all the details of the artistic process. For example, there are four major iconographic
representations of the Mother of God: enthroned, praying, showing the way, and
having mercy. But there are more than 230 variants on these four basic themes. The
iconographic possibilities are thus vast and rich. Yet the icon artist seeks no fame for
himself. On the contrary, since all true inspiration comes from the Holy Spirit, he will
not sign his name to his icon—or at most he will inscribe it “by the hand of.” Icons
are thus written rather than painted. Anonymity is the great goal, enabling worshippers
to experience the holiness that radiates from the icon, leading to prayer and adoration
and exaltation, without our asking “Who made this?” Icons thus belong in churches
and homes, where they serve as an aid to devotion, rather than in museums where
they would be exhibited for aesthetic purposes.

Through the 11th and 12th centuries, icons were as prevalent in the Western as
in the Eastern church. There are splendid examples of Romanesque art at Chartres
and in much of France, but also in Ireland, Spain, and Italy. Yet the great humanistic
renascence of the Italian 13th century—led by Cimabue and Giotto and Duccio in the
arts, by Thomas Aquinas in theology, by Dante in poetry—marked the gradual eclipse
of Western iconography. The arts now become obsessed with three-dimensional
perspective, with natural light and shadows, above all with the realistic portrayal of
people. No longer is sacred art oriented entirely toward the faithful gathered for
worship, but also for wealthy patrons who began to use it for the decoration of their
palaces. Religious pictures come thus to have their own lives, freed from the life of
the devotion, as important for the secular realm as for the church. The flat two-
dimensional art of the icon, with its deliberately stylized portraiture, was regarded,
already in the 13th century, as too unworldly and unreal. Only two centuries later
Raphael and da Vinci, Titian and Michelangelo, had become obsessed with realistic
anatomical detail, with colors true to their surroundings, and thus with the humanity
rather than the divinity of their religious subjects. Their Madonnas are often gorgeous
and sensuous women, utterly human figures rather than the exalted Mother of God
depicted as the most beautiful and pure of all women. In the East, for example, the
Virgin’s hair is never exposed but always covered. Michelangelo’s David, in its
celebration of the naked human form as beautiful in itself, is perhaps the ultimate
example of a Western non-iconic work of art.

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 Nowhere is the division between the icons of the Eastern church and the art of
Western Christianity more evident than in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.
The great German artist of the 16th century seeks to portray the brutal subjection of
the One who assumed our human nature. He is a man abandoned by God, his hands
and fingers stretching upward in a cry of utter dereliction. His lacerated body is limp
with the weight of wounded flesh, and his ashen corpse is shown to be already in a
state of decomposition. The emotional power, the theatrical subjectivity, the dramatic
intensity of this painting are unmatched. We can touch and feel and see Christ’s
enormous sorrow. Yet the Isenheim Altarpiece also raises fundamental questions and
doubts: Is this crucified man truly God incarnate, or is he an utterly wretched
creature? Is this divine victory or human defeat?

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky has his Christ-like hero named Myshkin express great horror
at a similarly realistic crucifixion by Hans Holbein. Holbein’s Christ is so cadaverous
that his eyes are already glazed over with the obliteration of death. Hence Myshkin’s
fearful exclamation: “Why, that’s a painting that might make some people lose their
faith!” The iconography of the East, by contrast, creates crucifixions which reflect
neither sadness nor abandon, neither despair nor disappointment, but rather the great
nobility and purity and incorruptibility of Christ’s soul. It is chiefly His divinity that is
made evident in his dying. His death is not a sign of failure but of the ultimate victory.
In a true icon of the crucified Christ we can discern also the glorified Christ of the
Resurrection, even the kingly Christ of the Ascension. Such icons seek not our
emotional and subjective identification with the Suffering Savior but rather our
spiritual and objective experience of that which is neither tangible nor visible: the
Defeat of Death. Indeed, the Orthodoxy liturgy contains this magnificent affirmation:
“Christ is Risen from the Dead. By His death He has defeated death and restored life
to those in the tombs.”

The most famous of all Byzantine icons envisions Christ as the Pantocrator,
the Maker of All Things. The fingers of his right hand offer blessing in the Byzantine
fashion: the first two fingers joined and raised to recall both his human and divine
natures, the other two fingers joined to the thumb to form the sign of the Trinity. His
eyes grip the worshipper with commanding clarity, as one of them glows with his
divine nature, while the other is slightly darkened by his human nature. Christ is often
enthroned between celestial hierarchies to emphasize his divine majesty. His head is
usually surrounded by a nimbus or mandorla bearing within it a cross, which is usually
inscribed with the Greek words ‘ο ‘ϖν, meaning, “I am [Who I am].” The Pantocrator
holds the Gospels with his left hand, and usually the Bible is opened to such a passage
as “I am the Light of the world,” or “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Christ
wears a red robe or tunic, called a chiton, covered with a cloak of dark blue or green,
the royal colors reminding us of his two distinct natures. And always there are the

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letters ΙC ΧC (the abbreviation for Jesus Christ in Greek: Ιησους Χριστος). So do
icons of the Virgin always contain the letters ΜΡ θΥ(the abbreviation for Mother of
God in Greek: Μητηρ θεου).

The aim of such icons is to reveal, to our unspiritual and mundane eyes, the
invisible and spiritual reality of the eternal world that everywhere envelopes and
transcends us. This desire to spiritualize the human world means that realistic
proportions and perspectives are abandoned. The size of a person in an icon is usually
determined by their importance and significance. A person standing in the
background can thus be larger than a person in the foreground. Heads and haloes
often overlap, for depth is of no real importance. The Incarnation has overthrown all
ordinary dimensions and perspectives. Indeed, everything in the icon takes place in
the forefront. The Western notion of perspective, rather than transforming nature,
seeks often to replicate the created order. The vanishing point of a Western realistic
painting is thus situated behind the picture. In an Eastern icon it is situated in front of
the icon in an inverse perspective. The focus point thus moves out away from the
icon toward the beholder, as the figure of the icon comes forth to meet the viewer.
“The result is an opening,” declares Michel Quenot (in The Icon: Window on the Kingdom
[St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991]) “a radiating forth, while the vanishing point in
an ordinary painting results in a convergence that closes up.” Neither are there any
shadows in icons, for the illumination of darkness is their essential aim.

Physical beauty as conceived in the West is utterly unimportant in Orthodox

icons; in fact, the human body almost disappears. It is the human face that matters,
for it reflects the image of God in us, our capacity to become ever more like God by
participating in his triune life. The ancient Greeks called a slave aprosopos: he who has
no face. “When souls start to break down,” wrote Nicholas Gogol, the great Russian
novelist of the 19th century, “then faces also degenerate.” This is a frightening truth,
given the increasing emptiness of the human visage in our time. We seek, of course, to
hide the vacancy by means of piercings and cosmetics and plastic surgery, perhaps as a
secret confession that we are slaves to our own desires and thus that we are faceless.

The iconic faces of Christ and all the saints, by contrast, are given a full frontal
and unimproved rendering. Only those who have not attained holiness are shown in
profile, and such malefactors as Judas are shown in an often ghastly silhouette. The
frontality of the iconic figures attracts the worshipper, opening their inner life to us.
The overall anatomy is thus subordinated to the head, in deliberate disproportion to
the rest of the body. Torsos and limbs are cloaked beneath garments that are not
meant to drape human bodies but to transfigure the tangible world, to reveal both
bodies and souls that glimmer with translucent light and color. “The folds of their
clothing,” writes Quenot, “do not express their physical movement, but rather the

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spiritual movement of the entire person.” Whenever the body is shown partially
naked, as in Christ’s baptism, it is rendered with a deliberate lack of naturalism in
order to stress the theophany that occurs there, the divine disclosure evident in the
transformed body. There is also an ascetic solemnity to the icons. The joy of the
Kingdom that they announce also must take into account the sin and tragedy of
human life, the darkness and suffering which the light must overcome.

The eyes of an icon-figure are often unnaturally large, to signify the great glory
they have seen. Sometimes the eyes are lusterless to signify that the holy ones see the
spiritual and not only the physical world. More often they burn with intensity and
confidence, revealing the great dynamism of their interior life. This often makes them
frighteningly fierce. The forehead—even of the infant Christ—is usually convex and
quite high, bulging with great spiritual wisdom and power. The cheeks and foreheads
of most icon faces are marked with the deep crevices of suffering known to ascetics,
monks, and bishops. The iconic nose is always thin and elongated, giving nobility to
the face, indicating that the saint no longer detects the scents of this world but only
the sweet odors of Christ and the life-giving breath of the Spirit as they gush forth
from a throat and neck that are disproportionately large. The mouth, as the most
sensuous of organs, is always finely and geometrically drawn to eliminate all sensuality.
The lips remain closed in the silence of contemplative wordlessness. A small mouth
also indicates, according to Cyril of Jerusalem, that “the body no longer needs earthly
nourishment because it has become a spiritual wonder.” The ears are often invisible
because they no longer hear the sounds and sirens of the world but are wholly attuned
to the commandments of God. An energetic chin, a sign of great courage against
fierce opposition, can often be seen beneath a bushy beard.

Such iconographic abandonment of naturalism in portraying facial features

emphasizes a serene detachment from mundane excitements. The saints are those
who, by way of the visible world, have seen and known the hugely more important
realm of the invisible. Rather than being despised, the five senses serve as the doors
and windows of the soul. The icon is not the image of a disincarnate world, therefore,
but rather the revelation of a world transformed, transfigured, and rendered
transparent and transcendent by a spiritualization that embraces the entire cosmos.
Hence the invitation of Abba Bessarion, a desert saint who lived at the end of the
fifth century to see in a new way—to behold the world not with mere optical sight that
scans surfaces but with transcendent vision that penetrates invisible distances and
depths. “Although blind toward the end of his life,” Quenot writes of Bessarion, “his
eyes seemed to be extremely large and transparent. Shortly before dying, he told a
young novice who had come for spiritual direction that a monk ought to be like the
cherubim and seraphim: Holos Ophthalmos: All eye!”
Ralph Wood, Baylor University