Moreover, the icon must never be regarded as a simple illustration to the Gospels or other theological texts. The art of iconography is not ‘icon painting’, but ‘icon writing’. It is not accidental that in Russian the creation of an icon signifies not pisat’ kraskami ‘to write with colours’ (to paint) but pisat’ pe rom ‘to write with a pen’ (to write). In order to understand the language of the icon one needs to find in oneself the desire to meet with this reality, to ‘enter’ into it, one needs to learn to ‘read’ the icon. But the most important thing that distinguishes an icon from a painting is its manmade incarnation of the invisible prototype, of ‘alternative reality’. The uniqueness of the phenomenon of the icon is that all these qualities are simultaneously present. The Church understands the icon as a sacred image of a higher, divine reality, as a visible reflection of the invisible.
“What is such an ‘icon’ then, wherein lies its meaning? The icon has been described as an archaeological item the icon has been analysed as a work of art. And this, he writes in the Sermon on Law and Grace, ‘fills his soul with joy’ “ Bychkov, ‘became one of worship that is, they saw in the icon, first and foremost, a holy object of veneration’ The Kievan Metropolitan Ilarion (mid-11th century) believed that a person contemplating an icon penetrates by his ‘interior gaze’ beyond the representation, and thus gains the possibility of spiritual intercourse with the prototype. ‘The main function of the image’, in the words of V. ““ purpose being to depict, through pigments on a flat surface, the likeness of a real prototype. Paradoxically, it is precisely this fundamental property of the icon which gives grounds to the contemporary philosophers who define the icon as ‘not art’ in the traditional European sense of the term” The main goal of such art is a specific, non-formalized, ‘contemplative’ knowledge. ““The icon in its artistic form embodies that ascetic ideal, which, the Church Fathers considered neither intellectual, nor even moral, but artistic labour. In A catalogue of the Russian icons in the British Museum by Yury Bobrov, the author writes: Icons depict a holy and infinite presence, not the temporal physical world
Icons are devotional images-windows through which viewer and holy subject make contact. It blurs the distinction between the secular and the divine. It is an attempt to make sacred something human. Whenever a celebrity dies, it is usual to identify them as an “an icon”.
The word “Icon” is an overworked word these days.
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