The innumerable beautiful ancient icons that have
flooded the west since the first World War, and the increasing interest in them
by artists, scholars and ordinary lovers of the beautiful has been one of the
bright phenomena of the past two generations. An enormous literature has
developed around the icon, both scholarly and popular, and centers for the
reproduction of old icons, and the painting of new ones has become especially
widespread since the Second World War.
For a great many people the Icon is the supreme symbol
of the Orthodox Church. This has been especially true on the popular level
since the western world was flooded by Russian émigrés and religious artifacts
following World War I. Shortly thereafter the revival in Byzantine studies
gained impetus and icons were studied on a serious level while the antique
shops offered examples of everything from rare ancient specimens to the great
liquid-eyed 19th century romantic western imitations that in the eighteenth
century had supplanted the traditional types in the Orthodox lands.
For many westerners, and in the Orthodox folklore,
icons are the Eastern substitute for statues commonly, and erroneously,
believed to the forbidden in the Orthodox Church. Actually, statues are by no
means forbidden in Orthodoxy and were always a regular part of the decorative
and devotional furnishing of the sacred space, the church interior.
Icon, now commonly used as a technical term for the
flat, perspective less devotional pictures of oriental Orthodoxy is simply the
Greek word for “image.” The Ecumenical Counciliar dogmatic decrees on icons
refer, in fact, to all religious images including three-dimensional statues.
Professor Sergios Verkhovskoi, the conservative
professor of dogmatics at St. Vladimir’s Seminary forthrightly condemns as
heretical anyone who declares statues as unOrthodox or in any way canonically
inferior to paintings. (By the 19th Century the traditional flat paintings,
derived from Hellenistic Egyptian funerary portraits, and currently claimed to
be “authentic” icons had been supplanted throughout the Orthodox Church by
western naturalistic painting, more or less skilled.)
How, then, did the common opinion arise that statues
were “western,” “heterodox,” “heretical”? The answer is quite simple and
derived from sound cultural and sociological foundations.
Statues were common in Byzantium. Our title picture
illustrates an ivory, three-dimensional statuette, of the Virgin and Child,
“Hodegetria,” from 10th Century Constantinople. Now in the Victoria and Albert
museum, it differs from similar examples in Hamburg and New York, in that it
was not cut out of an ivory tablet. The back is as carefully and skillfully
carved as the front.
Constantinople was filled with statues, both within and
outside of the churches. One author claims that over three hundred classical
statues adorned the plaza before Sancta Sophia. The famous Spanish Madonna, Our
Lady of Montserrat, is a Byzantine statue as are many ancient examples in
southern France, but it was in Russia that Orthodox Christian freedom in the
use of images survived. Let us consider the reasons why statues became
unpopular in Orthodoxy.
The main cause, of course, is Iconoclasm (image
breaking). As early as the art in the Roman catacombs Christians used sacred
images, both for instruction and, evidently, as a means of venerating the
person or event depicted. Most of these are paintings, but at least two statues
of the Good Shepherd are anterior to Constantine and the Veneration of the
Cross is so ancient no initial date can be fixed for it. By 576 we have
evidence, in the west, that an image of St. Martin was honored by a lamp
constantly burning before it and that Fortunatus had been cured of an ailment
by oil taken from it.
By the beginning of the 8th Century the Jews, basing
their stand on the Old Testament proscription of images, the Paulician heretics
(a branch of the Manicheans, a sect that despised “matter’ as inferior to
“spirit.”), and the Monophysites all opposed images. These latter were heretics
who declared that Jesus was God and hence His human nature was swallowed up by
His divinity and so his unimportant humanity should not be depicted.
Furthermore in some areas: Syria, Egypt and among the Germanic tribes, there
was a basic distrust of the Greek esteem for human beauty, especially as
manifested in art.
All of these influences seem to have proven congenial
to the Emperor Leo the Isaurian who in 726 issued his first edict for the
destruction of images. There was popular opposition, the Roman bishops
protested, and St. John of Damascus summarized the testimony of the Fathers in
the three famous essays. Leo died in 740 and was succeeded by his son
Constantine V, Copronymus, who pursued his father’s program with barbaric
vigor. When he died in 780 his wife, Irene, began the work of restoration and
seven years later convoked the Seventh Ecumenical Council in Nicaea which fully
restored the veneration of images. After a subsequent period of persecution (the
Iconoclastic movement survived in some strength from 726 to 842) the
restoration of images was fixed in 842.
The anti-image influence in Constantinople came from
Syrians and Armenians, tinctured by Monophysitism, in the west it came from the
Emperor Charlemagne and persisted in the Frankish lands until the ninth
century, although Rome and Italy adopted the Orthodox position from the first.
It is evident from this survey that racial-cultural heritages were highly
influential.
The same may be said of the practical disappearance of
statues as opposed to icons over large areas of the Orthodox Church. The
lingering memory of the Iconoclasts encouraged reticence and the Moslem
conquest froze Orthodox art in its most limited form. In the conquered areas
the Church was driven indoors, bells were proscribed, and the externals of
Christian worship were forbidden in public. While all representations of
creatures were banned for Moslem, and pressure put on Christians to conform as
much as possible the icon survived while the statue could not. Only in Russia
was the Church free enough to maintain its full aesthetic devotional tradition.
Northern Russian woodcarving was highly developed
before the coming of the Orthodox missionaries and it survived and was
“baptized” into the service of the Church. All images, statues and icons, were
carefully watched by ecclesiastical authority as in a ukase of the Holy Synod
on March 15, 1722. From the Revolution of 1918 until after World War II statues
of historical value suffered the destruction directed at all religious
monuments, but currently concern for the achievements of the Russian past has
focused money, attention and research on all ancient art and Orthodox statues
are especially valued.
 |
| The statue of the Most Holy Theotokos, The Holy Mountains Lavra (Ukraine) |
Hundreds of examples of these devotional objects were
destroyed in the first phase of the Revolutionary anti-religious campaign. Yet
many statues and three-dimensional crucifixes are plentiful and still in use.
The 1920’s discovered the Orthodox painted icon, the
1970’s the Orthodox statues.
It appears the sometimes heated "two dimensional
vs. three dimensional image" argument could be another example of culture
intruding upon the faith.
An article by Fr. Les Bundy
Source: http://westernorthodox.blogspot.com.by/2006/06/eastern-orthodox-statues.html
 |
| Help support the ministry of St. Elisabeth Convent |
CONVERSATION