Icon

• 1. Introduction

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  An icon, according to a story recorded by the sixth-century writer Theodorus Lector, once cost a painter the use of his own hands. A pagan artist had been commissioned to paint an image of Jesus but used the wrong model, giving him the parted hair associated with the god Zeus instead of the short, frizzy style considered more authentic, and his hands supposedly withered as punishment. Whether or not the story is literally true, it captures how much was believed to be at stake in getting a sacred image right. An icon is a religious work of art, most often a painting, found across the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran churches, usually depicting Jesus, Mary, saints, or angels. Icons have been painted on wood with egg tempera, cast in metal, carved into stone, embroidered onto cloth, and rendered in mosaic and fresco. In Greek, the word for painting an icon is the same word used for writing, which is why Orthodox writers sometimes speak of icon writing rather than icon painting. But that continuity of craft hides a much rockier history. How did a practice some early Christians considered dangerously close to idolatry become one of the defining art forms of an entire civilization? What did it take for an empire to ban, then restore, then ban again, and then finally restore its own sacred images? And why do churches that share the same Jesus still disagree, centuries later, about what an image of him is even allowed to do?

• 2. Debate Before the Image

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  Long before Christians made icons, the pagan religions around them had already been painting and sculpting their gods, and it remains unclear exactly when Christians began doing something similar. The scholar Paul Corby Finney, examining early Christian writing and surviving material remains, identified three competing attitudes among the earliest Christians toward sacred imagery: one held that people could see God directly, a second held they could not, and a third held that although they might glimpse God, they were better off not looking and were forbidden from depicting what they saw. Finney traced these positions to three different sources, Greek and Near Eastern pagan religion, Greek philosophy, and Jewish tradition, and concluded that the Greek philosophical resistance to depicting an invisible deity shaped early Christianity more than Jewish aversion to images did. He also argued that the real reason Christian art barely existed before the year 200 had nothing to do with theological principle: Christians simply lacked the land and capital that producing art required, and once they began acquiring both, distinctly Christian art appeared. Opposition to images persisted well after that, though. Around the year 305, bishops at the Spanish Synod of Elvira ruled flatly that pictures should not be placed in churches, so that they would not become objects of worship. A vivid account from the non-canonical Acts of John describes the apostle John discovering that a follower named Lycomedes had commissioned a portrait of him and was venerating it with garlands and lamps; John rebuked him, saying his act was childish and imperfect, that he had drawn a dead likeness of the dead. Roughly two centuries later, around 394, the bishop Epiphanius of Salamis wrote to a fellow bishop describing how he had personally torn down an image in a church, calling such images opposed to the Christian religion itself.

• 3. Legends Of A Living Portrait

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  The fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea preserved one of the earliest stories tied to an image of Jesus: King Abgar of Edessa, dying of illness, wrote to Jesus asking to be healed. Later versions of the tale grew more elaborate. A Syriac text from around the year 400 added a painted image of Jesus to the story, and by the sixth century the historian Evagrius Scholasticus was describing an image that appeared miraculously on a towel after Christ pressed the cloth to his face. Legend holds that this cloth stayed in Edessa until the tenth century, when General John Kourkouas brought it to Constantinople, where it disappeared during the Crusader sack of the city in 1204, though by then countless copies had already fixed its appearance in tradition. A parallel legend grew up around the Virgin Mary. The sixth-century writer Theodorus Lector recorded that around the year 460, the empress Eudokia sent an image of Mary called the Hodegetria, said to have been painted by the Apostle Luke, from Jerusalem to Pulcheria in Constantinople. According to the scholar Margherita Guarducci, when the last Latin emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, fled the city in 1261, he carried off the original circular portion of that image, which eventually ended up set within a much larger icon at the Benedictine abbey of Montevergine; Guarducci further reported that in 1950, researchers matched it against a mirror-image copy preserved in Rome at the Church of Santa Francesca Romana. Over time, the number of Marian icons attributed to Luke's brush multiplied enormously, including the Theotokos of Vladimir, the Theotokos of Smolensk, the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, an icon in India said to have been carried there by the Apostle Thomas, and at least seven more in Ethiopia. The art historian Bissera V. Pentcheva has argued the Luke legend was invented specifically to defend the legitimacy of icon veneration during the later controversy over whether images belonged in churches at all.

• 4. The Fight Over Images

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  For generations, the Byzantine state had tolerated public veneration of the emperor's own portrait, with candles burned and incense offered before it, mainly because suppressing the practice would have been politically dangerous. In the year 425, a Christian named Philostorgius accused Orthodox believers in Constantinople of idolatry for continuing to honor an image of the emperor Constantine the Great in just this way, a controversy that predates by more than a century any similar recorded dispute over honoring images of Jesus or the saints. That dispute became a full imperial policy in the following centuries. Between roughly 726 and 730, Emperor Leo III the Isaurian banned religious images outright, launching what historians call the Iconoclastic period. His son Constantine V convened a council at Hieria, near Constantinople, in 754 that formally forbade image veneration. The empress regent Irene reversed that ruling, convening a new council that took the title of the Seventh Ecumenical Council and condemned iconoclasm as a form of idolatry in its own right. The ban returned under Leo V in 815, and it was not settled for good until 843, when the empress regent Theodora restored icon veneration decisively at a council held in Constantinople. From that point forward, every Byzantine coin carried a religious image or symbol on its reverse side, most often Christ on higher-value coins, paired with the reigning emperor's head on the obverse, a visual pairing of divine and earthly authority that endured for the rest of the empire's history.

• 5. How The Image Took Shape

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  No painted panel icon older than the sixth century has survived except for a small group preserved at Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, since virtually every comparable example in Rome was painted over at some later date. Those surviving panels closely resemble the wax mummy portraits found at Fayyum in Egypt, though often of noticeably higher quality. The earliest depictions of Jesus were not portraits in any modern sense but generic images, usually showing him as a beardless young man; the long-haired, bearded face now considered the standard image of Jesus took considerable time to emerge and settle into a single accepted form. The historian Hans Belting has written that it is only in the second half of the sixth century that surviving evidence lets researchers say the church's organized use of religious images truly begins, a period the scholar Cyril Mango describes as one in which icons began attracting direct veneration and being credited with miracles, some of the stories, in his words, rather shocking to modern eyes. Earlier writers such as Eusebius and Irenaeus had already described image veneration and reported miracles associated with images as far back as the second century, suggesting the practice was older and messier than any single origin story could capture. Once icons were established as objects that could work miracles, a further category of image emerged around them: pictures believed to have appeared by no human hand at all, credited with an authority no painted copy could claim.

• 6. Color, Symbol, And Sacred Objects

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  Icons following Eastern Orthodox convention leave almost no room for artistic invention. Christ, the saints, and the angels are given halos; angels, and often John the Baptist, are given wings because they function as messengers; archangels carry a thin staff and sometimes a mirror; and figures keep the same facial features, attributes, and poses across generations of copies. Color carries specific meaning throughout: gold stands for the radiance of Heaven, red for divine life, blue for human life, and white, reserved only for scenes of resurrection and transfiguration, for the uncreated light of God. In images of Jesus and Mary, Jesus wears a red undergarment beneath a blue outer garment, representing God taking on human form, while Mary wears the reverse, a blue undergarment beneath a red overgarment, representing a human being granted divine gifts, encoding the doctrine of deification directly into the color scheme. Most icons also include calligraphic text naming the person or event shown, itself treated as part of the image rather than a caption added to it. A related but separate category of image, the palladium, was believed to protect not just a viewer but an entire city, army, or nation, a tradition the English language borrowed as early as 1600 to describe anything believed to guarantee safety. The custom traces back before the Christian era, to the ancient Greeks, and Byzantine practice carried it forward: palladia were paraded around the walls of besieged cities and sometimes carried directly into battle, treated as protection made visible.

• 7. A Theology Of The Image

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  The Orthodox Church maintains and teaches that the sacred image has existed from the beginning of Christianity, the theologian Leonid Ouspensky has written, and within that tradition, accounts that outside historians treat skeptically, such as an image of Christ said to date from his own lifetime, or the weeping and moving Mother of God of the Sign icon from Novgorod, are accepted as part of church history rather than legend. The underlying justification rests on the theology of the Incarnation, the belief that Christ himself is the eikon, or image, of God, a doctrine clarified across the first seven Ecumenical Councils without ever fundamentally changing. A council held in 860 summarized the stakes plainly, declaring that everything spoken in written words is proclaimed just as fully in the language of colors. Orthodox teaching traces the biblical roots of this idea back to the creation of man in God's own image in Genesis, and notes that even after the Book of Exodus forbade graven images, God went on to command the Israelites to build statues and weave tapestries of cherubim, imagery Solomon later expanded further while building the First Temple. In the Book of Numbers, God instructs Moses to raise a bronze serpent so that anyone bitten by a snake and looking at it would be healed, an object John of Damascus treated as an early icon in its own right, and Jesus later invoked the same serpent in the Gospel of John. The theologian Basil of Caesarea explained the underlying logic through a simple analogy: pointing to a statue of Caesar and asking who it depicts, he wrote that the name and honor ascribed to the statue passes over to the original, the archetype, Caesar himself. John of Damascus put the stakes for image-breakers in stark terms, writing that anyone who tries to destroy icons is the enemy of Christ, the Holy Mother of God and the saints, and the defender of the Devil and his demons. Orthodox practice also extends this reasoning to three-dimensional statues, not only flat paintings; the priest Les Bundy has noted that the professor Sergios Verkhovskoi, a conservative authority on Orthodox dogmatics, went so far as to condemn as heretical anyone who ranked statues as canonically inferior to paintings, pointing to venerated statues such as the Mother of God at Sokolica Monastery in Serbia.

• 8. Traditions Across The World

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  Byzantine icon painting itself survives only in fragments before the eleventh century, thanks to the destruction of Iconoclasm, the plundering of Constantinople by Venice during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and the city's final fall in 1453. It was during the Komnenian period, from 1081 to 1185, that icon veneration became widespread across the Byzantine world, aided by the introduction of the iconostasis, a screen built specifically to display icons in church. After the Byzantine collapse, the tradition carried on in the Balkans, Russia, and the Caucasus, and on Venetian-ruled Crete, where painters trained through a guild called the Scuola di San Luca and exported work across Europe; the school's most celebrated graduate, El Greco, carried Byzantine conventions with him after relocating to Venice, and the tradition only declined after the Ottomans took the city of Heraklion in 1669. In Russia, icons entered common use after the conversion of Kievan Rus' in 988, most often painted on wood and displayed in a household's krasny ugol, or red corner; painters such as Andrei Rublev and Dionisius later expanded the style well beyond its Byzantine models, until a mid-seventeenth-century split under Patriarch Nikon of Moscow divided traditionalist Old Believers from a state church newly open to Western European realism. Ukraine developed its own school after Kievan Rus as well, centered on Lviv by the sixteenth century and later home to the strikingly realistic painter Ivan Rutkovych, with some Cossack-era icons even depicting living rulers alongside sacred figures. Farther south, Aleppo hosted its own dedicated school of icon painting, founded by the priest Yusuf al-Musawwir and active there from at least 1645 to 1777. In the West, where the word icon is rarely used, painted images followed Eastern patterns closely until the thirteenth century, after which Western artists were given far more freedom toward realism; production only began approaching Eastern output in the fifteenth century, once cheap woodcut prints, some barely an inch tall, let peasants buy and pin devotional images directly to their walls. The Reformation then split Western practice sharply: Lutherans continued to favor sacred images, while Calvinists turned firmly iconoclastic, a divide formal enough that a joint Lutheran-Orthodox commission still felt the need to address it directly in a statement issued at Helsinki in July 1993.