The icon, by a concrete symbolism that preserves it from any tendency to allegory, expresses the deification of humankind and the sanctification of the universe, in other words, the truth of beings and things. The symbolic, integrated in the fullness of communion, is always at the service of the person whom it reveals.
Light in an icon does not come from an exact point, for, as we read in Revelation, the New Jerusalem ‘has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light’ (21.23). It is everywhere, without casting a shadow; or rather it is always within, everything shines with an inward sunlight. The iconographers actually call the background of the icon ‘light’: the symbol of God ‘all in all’. Perspective is often inverted. Lines do not converge towards a ‘vanishing point’, the sign of fallen space which separates and imprisons, but expand in the light, ‘from glory to glory’. The saints are almost always shown full face – the profile suggests the breaking of communion, the beginning of absence – coming to us from infinity, opening up this deified space.
In this setting, the face is depicted according to the greatest personal likeness, but pacified, unified, illumined by the Spirit. The lips are thin and pure, the ears reduced in size. The dominating features are the huge eyes, full of seriousness and gentleness – the sanctified human being becomes ‘all regard’, says St Macarius – and the large, wise forehead.
Around these faces, the animals and plants, the earth and the rock are stylized according to their spiritual nature. Abstraction here is a way of making the representation more penetrating, not less. Prehistoric cave-paintings of animals would not be out of place on an icon, nor would Bazaine’s depiction of the elements, in the windows at St Severin, done in such a way as to bring out their sacramental meaning. Here also the longing for the person which torments individualistic Western art might be fulfilled; some of the faces painted by Rembrandt at the end of his life are virtually icons.
Indeed, the art of the icon has never been limited to any particular style, not even that of the Eastern Church. Christian art in the West, not only in the Romanesque period but up to the 14th century in Italy, shares the same vision. While never itself being fixed in stereotype forms, it has kept faithful to the same profound inspiration, embodied in ‘canons’ setting out the meaning of the icons and what incidents and people may be depicted. This inspiration, that of the divine-human, has several times included, even provoked, the researches of humanism. We are too apt to forget that the Renaissance began with Macedonian art in the early 12th century. From Macedonia and Serbia the affirmation of the human in beauty spread to Italy, there bringing about, in the 13th century, a ‘transfigured renaissance’, a divine-humanism, soon to fall apart in the succeeding centuries. In the Byzantine world, the movement lasted longer, culminating in the first frescos of Mistra, and even more strikingly at Constantinople, with the tenderness and the dynamism of Kariye Camii. Then came the last invasions, which destroyed Byzantine culture and drove Orthodoxy underground. Soon afterwards Christendom was riven apart. Perhaps, as a result of the present encounter between Christians of East and West, ‘divine-humanism’ will be able to flourish again.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
