The Iconographer and the Canon

The icon is painted within a tradition, not invented: the iconographer works from received prototypes and pattern-books (podlinniki, hermeneia), traditionally prepares through prayer and fasting, and understands the painting of an icon as a liturgical and ecclesial act — “theology in line and color” — rather than an expression of personal artistic genius. This file treats the iconographer’s vocation and the canon that governs it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Working Within the Tradition

The iconographer does not paint from imagination or invent new images at will; he works within a received tradition, reproducing and transmitting established prototypes so that the icon remains theologically accurate and continuous with what the Church has always confessed (Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 1, on the iconographic canon; Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982). This is why icons of the same subject painted centuries and continents apart are recognizably the same image: the tradition hands on not only the doctrine but the very configuration — the composition, the gestures, the colors, the attributes — of each sacred subject. The “canon” of iconography is this body of received form. It is not a set of conciliar laws (Nicaea II defined the theology of the image, not a style; see The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787)) but a living tradition of practice, transmitted from master to apprentice and preserved in reference collections.

This transmission was aided by pattern-books. In the Greek tradition the best-known is the Hermeneia tes zographikes technes (“Interpretation of the Art of Painting”), the painter’s manual compiled by Dionysius of Fourna on Mount Athos in the early eighteenth century, which sets out the technical procedures of icon-painting and the iconographic schemes for the feasts, the saints, and the scriptural scenes (Dionysius of Fourna, The ‘Painter’s Manual’, trans. Paul Hetherington, London: Sagittarius Press, 1974). In the Russian tradition the corresponding guides are the podlinniki — the “originals” or model-books, some purely verbal (describing each saint’s appearance, age, hair, vesture, and the colors to use) and some illustrated (litsevye podlinniki, “facial originals”) — which fixed the received form of each subject for the workshops (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 2, on the podlinniki). These manuals are not the source of the icon’s authority — the tradition is older than any book — but they are the means by which the canon was practically transmitted and kept stable across generations of painters.

The Iconographer’s Preparation: Prayer and Fasting

Because the icon is a sacred and ecclesial work and not a private artwork, the tradition surrounds its making with spiritual discipline. The iconographer is traditionally expected to be a practicing member of the Church who prepares for the work through prayer, fasting, confession, and communion, undertaking the painting as an ascetic and liturgical act rather than a commercial or self-expressive one (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1, on the iconographer’s vocation; the ideal is stated in the disciplinary tradition and revived in the modern schools — see The Modern Icon Revival). The idea has a conciliar echo: the Council of Nicaea II, in the acclamations and canons surrounding its definition, located the content of the icon in the tradition of the Church and the art in the painter — a distinction later summarized in the maxim that “the composition belongs to the holy Fathers, the art alone to the painter,” so that the iconographer’s task is faithful transmission, not invention (a formulation drawn from the spirit of Nicaea II’s decree on the icon; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1).

The Russian Church gave this ideal explicit legislative form in the Stoglav (“Hundred Chapters”) Council of Moscow in 1551, which enjoined that iconographers be of upright life, that they follow the ancient models — invoking above all the authority of the great St. Andrei Rublev — and that the work be supervised for fidelity to tradition (the Stoglav, 1551, chapters on iconography; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 2, on the Stoglav and Rublev). The saintly iconographer is himself part of the tradition: St. Andrei Rublev (c. 1360s–1427/30), the greatest of Russian iconographers and himself a canonized saint, and St. Alypius (Alipy) of the Kiev Caves (eleventh century), venerated as an iconographer-saint, stand as models of the vocation in which holiness of life and holiness of art are joined (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982, on Rublev; the Paterik of the Kiev Caves on St. Alypius).

The Icon as Theology and Liturgical Act

The deepest claim about the iconographer’s work is that the icon is theology — that it teaches and confesses the faith in visual form with an authority parallel to that of the written and spoken word. This conviction is expressed in a decree associated with the Triumph of Orthodoxy and the theology of Nicaea II: that “what the word declares by sound, the painting shows silently by representation,” so that the icon and the Gospel say the same thing in different media (a formulation reflecting the teaching of Nicaea II; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1). The phrase often used in the modern Orthodox recovery — the icon as “theology in line and color” (associated with Prince Eugene Trubetskoy’s essays and the Russian religious renaissance) — captures the same point: the icon is not illustration decorating a theology stated elsewhere but is itself a mode of theological confession (Eugene Trubetskoy, Icons: Theology in Color, trans. Gertrude Vakar, SVS Press, 1973; Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982).

From this follow the characteristic marks of the iconographer’s practice. The painter traditionally does not sign the icon in the manner of a Western artist claiming authorship, for the icon is the Church’s, not his; where inscriptions of the painter’s hand appear, they are typically framed as a prayer (“by the hand of…” asking the prayers of the beholder) rather than a signature of ownership (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 2). The finished icon is then blessed — set apart for sacred use by the prayer of a priest and, in the received rites, by the sprinkling of holy water — completing its passage from a made object to a venerable image (the blessing of icons is provided in the Slavic and Greek liturgical books; see Veneration, the Iconostasis, and the Icon Corner). [Disputed: some liturgical scholars note that the earliest tradition treated the naming and liturgical use of an icon, rather than a separate consecratory rite, as what made it an icon, and that the developed blessing-service is a later addition; the practice of blessing icons is nonetheless standard in contemporary Orthodox use.]

The iconographer, in sum, is a servant of a tradition larger than himself: he receives the canon, prepares himself spiritually to transmit it, and offers his work back to the Church as a confession of the faith in line and color. His discipline is the practical, workshop side of the whole theology of the icon — the point at which the doctrine defined at Nicaea II becomes wood, gesso, egg, pigment, and gold in a particular pair of praying hands (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1–2).

See Also

• The Language of the Icon — the visual grammar the canon transmits
• The Major Icons and Types — the received prototypes the iconographer works from
• The Modern Icon Revival — the twentieth-century “return to the canon” and the revived schools
• Veneration, the Iconostasis, and the Icon Corner — the blessing and use of the finished icon
• Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm — the hub essay this collection expands

References

• Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The iconographic canon; the podlinniki; the Stoglav and Rublev; the iconographer’s vocation and the blessing of icons.)
• Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982.
• Dionysius of Fourna. The ‘Painter’s Manual’ of Dionysius of Fourna. Trans. Paul Hetherington. London: Sagittarius Press, 1974. (The Greek Hermeneia.)
• Trubetskoy, Eugene N. Icons: Theology in Color. Trans. Gertrude Vakar. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973. (The icon as visual theology.)
• The Stoglav Council of Moscow (1551), the chapters on iconography (Russian text in standard editions). Cited via Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 2.
• The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, on St. Alypius the Iconographer. Trans. Muriel Heppell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1989.