Meaning and history of the icon
The history of the Russian icon, it sometimes seems, should be
written not in academic language, but in the high language of
tragedy. Periods of spiritual flight and artistic revelation,
periods of oblivion and repression, periods of reverence and
rapture have all found their place in it, as they have in the
history of Russia itself. But at all times the icon remained an
‘image’ of the eternal, a just and wonderful divine world,
beckoning to itself all those who find within themselves the
spiritual strength to perceive this world with their interior
gaze.
The Russian icon in its artistic form embodies that ascetic
ideal, which, according to Pavel Florensky, the Church Fathers
considered not intellectual, nor even moral, but artistic labour.
The main goal of such art is a specific, non-formalized,
‘contemplative’ knowledge. Paradoxically, it is precisely this
fundamental property of the icon which gives grounds to the
contemporary philosophers who define the icon as ‘not art’ in the
traditional European sense of the term
.
The contemporary Russian word ‘ikon’ was
borrowed from German only in the 19th century, and in ancient times
they used a more accurate equivalent of the Greek ‘eikon’ – ‘obraz’
(image), its purpose being to depict, through pigments on
a flat surface, the likeness of a real prototype. Icon veneration
was absorbed into Rus along with the rest of Christianity’s
fundamental beliefs, and here the value of the icon was perceived,
above all, in its sacred meaning. ‘The main function of the image’,
in the words of V. Bychkov, ‘became one of worship; that
is, they saw in the icon, first and foremost, a holy object of
veneration’ . The
Kievan Metropolitan Ilarion (mid-11th century) believed that a
person contemplating an icon penetrates by his ‘interior gaze’
beyond the representation, and thus gains the possibility of
spiritual intercourse with the prototype. And this, he writes in
the Sermon on Law and Grace, ‘fills his soul with joy’
.
Any representation, any visual form, has its
object – in certain circumstances this representation encompasses
the visible world or is the embodiment of an idea in the forms of
the visible world, in others it is the embodiment of subjective
sensations and ideas arising in the artist’s consciousness. Thus
Vasilii Kandinsky, the founder of Abstractionism, sought grounds
for the creation of artistic form in ‘inner necessity’, which ‘must
be founded only on the principle of a wise touch to a person’s
soul’ . The icon
painter seeks the foundations of form in ‘touching’ the divine.
What is such an ‘icon’ then, wherein lies its meaning? The icon has
been described as an archaeological item; the icon has been
analysed as a work of art. The Church understands the icon as a
sacred image of a higher, divine reality, as a visible reflection
of the invisible. The uniqueness of the phenomenon of the icon is
that all these qualities are simultaneously present. But the most
important thing that distinguishes an icon from a painting is its
manmade incarnation of the invisible prototype, of ‘alternative
reality’. In order to understand the language of the icon one needs
to find in oneself the desire to meet with this reality, to ‘enter’
into it, one needs to learn to ‘read’ the icon. It is not
accidental that in Russian the creation of an icon signifies not
pisat’ kraskami ‘to write with colours’ (to paint) but
pisat’ perom ‘to write with a pen’ (to write). The art of
iconography is not ‘icon painting’, but ‘icon writing’. Moreover,
the icon must never be regarded as a simple illustration to the
Gospels or other theological texts. Visual form and Word are here
fused together, and the artistic language of icon painting directly
embodies spiritual phenomena. Thus the highlights on an icon are
not in the least depictions of gleams of light, invoked to create
the illusion of rounded form, but a strict system of ‘highlights’
invoking the symbolic incarnation of the emanation of divine
energy, which is poured into the world and gives life and meaning
to all the created world. In its spiritual symbolism the ancient
icon is equal to the contemporary, bearing in mind the differences
in strength of the artistic incarnation. The icon painter, layering
with colours or gold ‘light’, does not adorn the representation,
does not create the illusion of three-dimensionality, but embodies
the radiance of the ‘Light of Mount Tabor’.