Half the Icon, Subtle Docetism We often hear that only the image matters since veneration of the image ascends to the prototype. However, this considers only half the icon. As St. Theodore says,“its not admissible to call something a prototype if it does not have its image transferred into something material.Therefore, since we confess that Christ has the relation to prototype, like any other individual, He undoubtedly must have an image transferred from His...
It was a bit more than a year ago that we posted our first article on the Orthodox Arts Journal in the hopes of fostering Orthodox traditional arts of all kinds. The OAJ is the brainchild of a few of us hoping to see a space where individuals could encounter the beauty, richness and diversity of liturgical art while coming to understand the worldview, the analogies and forms they contain. Just as Kontoglu and Ouspenski re-lit...
A few months ago, we posted an article about a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Prosopon School of Iconography and Iconology. The event took place in April of this year in Princeton NJ. They had 120 people attend, mostly from the US, but also from England, Estonia and Russia. For those nearby, there is also an exhibit of icons at the Erdman Center on the Princeton Theological Campus, with icons from the...
Since the post I wrote on Ethiopian art has attracted many comments, I thought I would share a few thoughts on Ethiopian carving. I had seen images of Ethiopian carving before my trip there and was looking forward to finding where they came from. It is in the city of Axum, where the fabled Ark of the Covenent is said to be kept, that I encountered a slew of steatite icons and sculptures of which...
Gabe Martini has written a nice concise defense of icons in the Patristic record for the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy blog. It is a response to a Protestant article, but it shows nicely how thin the opposition to icons is in the Church Fathers. Gabe relies strongly on our own fr.Steven Bigham’s books and so I thought it would be nice to repost his article here. It is in five parts, but Gabe has brought...
“The first rule of art is beauty.” So begins “A Primer of Pictorial Devices in Medieval Painting” written by artist Gloria Thomas. The primer is a guide to competitors in the Apocalypse Art Prize. The prize is $10,000 and the deadline for entry is December 31, 2013. Complete information about the prize and how to submit an entry can be found on the competition’s web site: Apocalypseprize.com The theme for all entries is Saint...
Alexander Krylov is a Russian master of amber. For several years he worked with a few others to recreate the famous “amber room”, the gift of the Prussian king to Peter the Great in the 18th century. It was known as “the eight wonder of the world”, but was looted by the Nazis during the war. It has been recreated in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo, and Alexander Krylov spent 24 years working on this reconstruction....
I would like to call attention to some of the ancient churches of Western Europe which predate the Great Schism. These churches offer a glimpse of Western Orthodoxy as it once was, and as such, offer us some suggestions for Orthodoxy in the West as it could be today. European churches of the 7th to 11th century are generally classified as “Pre Romanesque” architecture. They represent a continuation of Imperial Roman building traditions. Although...
Icon carving is an art which has been experiencing a great renewal in Orthodoxy all across the world. In the last 15 years we have seen several amazing icon carvers appear, with Aidan Hart in England, the Azbuhanov couple in Russia. The art of miniature carving has also been finding a quality it had lost in the last few centuries. I have shown some Serbian carvers here as examples of that, George Bilak and...
Lets now look at the nous as an organ of perception. In speaking of the soul, according to its different faculties, we tend to create a fragmented notion of it as consisting of mutually exclusive layers, rather than as an interrelated whole. Therefore, we tend to forget that the nous permeates all of man. Even though it is the innermost aspect of man, the eye of the heart, the “border” between the created and...
