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We appreciate the tradition of Russian culture, an appreciation of the country's enormous artistic wealth. You know, icons were painted not for the sake of art, but for the Church. Thus, its content was determined directly by the needs and the purposes of the Church. The purpose and the ideal of Byzantine icon painting was the expression of the category of holiness.
Russian icons (icon = image, Greek) are usually painted on a wooden base - icon board. The board is consisted of several parts bound together at the back by planks. The image is placed on the face side of the board in a shallow rectangle or square groove (ark). Before painting a board is covered with fabric, primed by mixture of natural glue and chalk, covered with the initial layer of dark red-brown or greenish paint and lighten where needed with ochre or whiting. Radial lines - assist, were gold painted on the top of regular paint. Assist in the ancient art marked the "Divine Forces" and was placed on the Christ clothes only.
Russia is like a giant sphinx, and remains an enigma not only to foreigners, but to Russians as well. The mysterious multiplicity and irrationalism of the Russian soul and the ambiguous and unexplored nature of many phenomena of its history and culture compel us to address our past again and again and try to link it to the present.
To be able to understand icons, one should know the way people of the Middle Ages perceived the concept of time. Different views on this concept in Western Europe and Byzantium were formed during the Renaissance period, when Europe, unlike Byzantium, changed its attitude toward the world. The temporary seizure of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 made the alienation of Byzantium from Europe even more profound and irreversible.
Different perception of time resulted in a different approach to the world, to the events taking place in it, and to the role of man in these events. The meaning and objectives of art in Byzantium and Western Europe changed accordingly. As a result, Western European artists and icon-painters in Orthodox countries developed fundamentally different artistic techniques.
Icon cannot be treated as an ordinary work of art, for icon is not a painting. The painting makes use of lines and colors to represent people and events of everyday life. Since Renaissance, life and nature have been depicted on paintings by reproducing the three-dimensional world of people, animals, landscapes and things on a flat surface. A plot, even borrowed from myths, was still translated into the language of earthly images.
Expressionist and abstract art aims at reflecting the artist's emotions and sensations, which change and distort proportions of objects and events; alter the color balance between them; deform objects completely, or do without objects whatsoever. But even these diverse experiments with colors and shapes do not introduce the spectator to a different world in terms of space, time, and values.
Throughout the history of human culture, this was exactly what icons did. In fact, icons do not depict the other world but rather embody it, using special artistic techniques developed in the course of centuries.
Icon's color plays a special role as well. It is a symbolic language, which means to represent the inner glow of objects and human faces -- the glow that originates from outside the material world -- rather than their coloring. Icons' golden strokes represent this supernatural glow, while their golden background symbolizes the space "not of this world." Icons have no shadows; in God's Kingdom everything is permeated with light.
Moreover, icons cannot be examined in the same way as pictures. They lack both the space we are used to live in and events linked by a usual kind of casual relationships. Icon is a window facing the world of a different nature; this window, however, is open to those only who are endowed with spiritual vision.
Those who wish to come closer to understanding icons need to view them with the eyes of a believer, for whom God is a true and omnipresent reality underlying each and every event and an invisible Witness and Judge, Who never stops to watch each and every person.
The principles and techniques of creating icons had been evolving for many centuries before Rus' took them over. Icon-painting traditions were brought to Old Rus' from Byzantium along with the adoption of Christianity at the end of the tenth century.
Being religious, the Byzantine art of that time followed strict rules. Icon-painting regulations resulted from a long discussion and struggle related to Iconoclasm, the latter being mainly a consequence of Moslem military and ideological pressure upon Byzantium. In Islam, the Biblical ban on worshipping idols, which included, in Moslems' view, the cross and icons, was absolutized.
In 730 the Byzantine Emperor Leo III banned the cult of icons. Before ascending the throne, he stayed long in the Empire's eastern provinces. There he was influenced by the bishops of Asia Minor, who, being in turn influenced by Islam, wished to cleanse Christianity of all that appeared to be material and unspiritual. Many icons, frescoes, and mosaics were destroyed. However, this did not stop Christians from venerating icons; they still continued to do it despite severe persecutions.
The veneration of icons was re-established temporarily in 787 at the Seventh Ecumenical Council and finally, in 843.
It was the prominent theologian and politician John of Damascus (c. 675-750), an authoritative icon advocate, whose arguments determined the Council's decisions. John of Damascus taught that the Old Testament's ban on creating images of God had been temporary: "In the old times they never represented God in images. But now that God made Himself manifest in flesh and lived among people, we depict the visible God. It is not the Invisible that I depict, but the flesh of God that people have seen…." John of Damascus wrote that God had come to people in His Son Jesus Christ. He had come into the world of people, having a human body, "for we need what is akin to us."
The visible does not convey the essence of the incomprehensible God. But just as a body has a shadow, so every original has its copies, and so "icon is a reminder." Similarly, just as the Holy Scripture depicts the Sacred History in a verbal form, so icons illustrate it too -- though not verbally, but using lines and colors.
Therefore icon as an image is not a copy of the original, but rather a symbol through which one can rise to understanding the divine. Icon acts as a mystical mediator between the earthly world and the heavenly one. This is how the goal of icon-painting was defined.
The Seventh Ecumenical Council demanded of icon-painters that they strictly follow iconographic canons in their work. The above canons regulate both the character and the way of depicting religious episodes and the images of saints. This is so because icon is both the source and guardian of the Church Tradition. Therefore breaking iconographic canons is equal to distorting the Tradition and lapsing into heresy.
Icons are made up of symbols in the same way as a sacred text is made up of letters; only those who know the "letters" of this alphabet can read and understand the text of iconography.
A comprehensive set of canonical icons fully encompasses the Orthodox teaching. "If a pagan comes to you asking, 'Show me your faith,' just take him to church and show him various kinds of sacred images."
Icon is a graphic exposition of the Holy Tradition. To keep it unchanged, icon originals, or standards, were established and passed on from artist to artist and from generation to generation. When they were reproduced, the faces (litsa in Russian) of the canonized saints lost their individual traits turning into symbols (liki) to reflect their celestial spirituality.
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