What Is an Icon in Art? A Painting Meant to Be Looked Through
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
An icon is not a picture of a holy figure so much as a window onto one, which is why it is painted by rules rather than by invention, why perspective works backwards in it, and why a painter speaks of writing an icon rather than making one. Almost everything that looks like technical limitation in Byzantine painting turns out to be a deliberate choice about what the image is for.
What the conventions do
Icon painting follows a visual grammar developed to keep the viewer from treating the image as a scene:
- •Gold ground rather than a landscape or sky, removing the figure from ordinary space and reflecting candlelight so the surface changes as the viewer moves
- •Inverse perspective, in which lines diverge as they recede so that a building or book opens outward, placing the vanishing point in front of the image at the viewer rather than behind it
- •Frontality and direct gaze, since the figure faces the viewer and is present to them rather than absorbed in an action, with profile usually reserved for figures who are not to be venerated
- •No cast shadows and no single light source, because the light is understood to come from within the figure rather than from the room
- •Elongated bodies, small mouths and large eyes, which subordinate the physical to the contemplative
- •Inscriptions naming the figure, which are required, since an unlabelled image is held not to be an icon at all
- •Fixed types, so that a particular saint is recognisable by consistent features and attributes across centuries and countries
How they are made
The traditional technique is egg tempera on a wooden panel and the sequence is prescribed. A seasoned board is prepared, frequently with a linen cloth glued over it, then coated with many thin layers of gesso, a mixture of chalk and animal glue, which is sanded to a hard smooth surface. The design is transferred and incised. Gold leaf is applied over a ground of bole, a fine red clay, and burnished with a smooth stone to a mirror finish. Painting then proceeds from dark to light, beginning with a deep base tone for the flesh and building successive lighter layers over it, ending with fine white highlights, so the figure appears to emerge from darkness into light, which is a theological statement embedded in the method. The pigments are bound in egg yolk, which dries quickly, cannot be blended wet and therefore demands hatched layering, and which becomes extremely durable. A final varnish of drying oil completes it. Because the method is prescribed, an icon is understood as a transmission rather than an original composition, and painters have traditionally worked anonymously and under fasting and prayer.
The fight over images
The status of icons produced one of the most serious crises in Christian history. Iconoclasm, the rejection and destruction of religious images, dominated the Byzantine empire in two periods during the eighth and ninth centuries, driven by the argument that venerating images violated the commandment against graven images and that depicting Christ either divided his natures or circumscribed the uncircumscribable. The defence, argued principally by John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite, rested on the incarnation: if God took material form, matter can represent him, and refusing to depict Christ implicitly denies that he was genuinely human. A distinction was drawn between veneration offered to the image, which passes to the person depicted, and worship, which belongs to God alone. The image party prevailed, with the position confirmed at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 and finally in 843, an event still commemorated in Orthodoxy as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Vast numbers of earlier images were destroyed in the interval, which is why so little pre-iconoclast Byzantine painting survives outside Saint Catherine's monastery in Sinai, which lay beyond imperial control.
The afterlife
Icon painting continued in the Orthodox world with regional schools developing distinct characters, and the Russian tradition produced its greatest figures in Andrei Rublev, whose Trinity of the early fifteenth century is treated as the summit of the form, and Theophanes the Greek. Post-Byzantine Crete supplied icons to both Orthodox and Catholic markets and trained the painter who became El Greco, whose elongated figures and non-naturalistic light are visibly continuous with his origins even after decades in Spain. Western art moved in the opposite direction from the Renaissance onwards, towards illusionistic space, modelled light and individual invention, which makes the contrast between the two traditions a useful way of seeing that neither is simply more advanced. Twentieth-century modernism rediscovered icons precisely because they were not illusionistic, with Matisse among those who studied them in Moscow, and their influence on flattened space and non-naturalistic colour is direct.
The takeaway
An icon is built to be looked through rather than at, which explains its conventions: gold ground removing ordinary space, inverse perspective placing the vanishing point at the viewer, frontal gaze, no cast shadows, fixed recognisable types and a required inscription. It is painted in egg tempera over gesso, from dark to light, by a prescribed method that treats the work as transmission rather than invention. Byzantine iconoclasm destroyed most earlier examples before the image party prevailed in 843.