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Lecture
READING: Icons and Iconoclasm
READING: Christian Iconography (Optional but helpful) – Please only read the sections subtitled “Art and Iconography” and “Theology of Icons” — don’t continue into the section titled “Eschatology,” unless you really want to.
OUTSIDE VIDEO: Icons from Sinai

Question:

Byzantine icons represent one of the most enduring artistic styles in the history of art, and yet their early history of shrouded in controversy. First of all, what is your understanding of the term “icon”?

Listen carefully to Brother Justin’s remarks in the outside video if you need help. Describe the typical style of Byzantine icons.

What are their common characteristics? Although it is hard to imagine these objects as controversial, in fact they were! What is the source of the iconoclastic controversy?

What were the iconoclasts’ concerns with the way images were being used? What did the defenders of images think was valuable about icons? Finally, who do you personally think was right?

 

Please use at least one of the primary sources from lecture below in your answer:

Saint Basil (c.320–379): “Just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation.”

An anonymous account of the Virgin Hodegetria in Constantinople: “Every Tuesday twenty men come to the church of the Hodegetria; they wear long red linen garments, covering up their heads … there is a great procession and the men clad in red go one by one up to the icon; the one with whom the icon is pleased is able to take it up as if it weighed almost nothing. He places it on his shoulders and they go chanting out of the church to a great square, where the bearer of the icon walks with it from one side to the other, going fifty times around the square. When he sets it down then others take it up in turn.”

Pope Gregory III (c. 736) to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles: “It has come to our ears that your Fraternity, seeing certain adorers of images, broke and threw down these same images in Churches. And we commend you indeed for your zeal against anything made with hands being an object of adoration; but we signify to you that you ought not to have broken these images. For pictorial representation is made use of in Churches for this reason; that such as are ignorant of letters may at least read by looking at the walls what they cannot read in books.

Your Fraternity therefore should have both preserved the images and prohibited the people from adoration of them, to the end that both those who are ignorant of letters might have wherewith to gather a knowledge of the history, and that the people might by no means sin by adoration of a pictorial representation.”
Imperial Edict from Synod convened by the Emperor Leo (756): “Supported by the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers, we declare unanimously, in the name of the Holy Trinity, that we shall reject and remove and curse every likeness which is made out of any material and color whatever by the evil art of painters…. If anyone ventures to represent the divine image with material colors, let him be expelled! …. If anyone shall endeavor to represent the forms of the Saints in lifeless pictures with material colors, and does not rather represent their virtues as living images in himself, let him be expelled!”

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