Icons East and West and Modern

The icon in the longer perspective: how the Eastern icon and Western religious art parted after the schism and what was theologically at stake — treated soberly and without polemic, assessed from the Orthodox side with the Western reading reported in its own terms; and the twentieth-century recovery of the icon — Ouspensky, Kontoglou, the “return to the canon,” and the icon’s spread through the diaspora — with a closing assessment.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

This section sets the icon against its Western counterpart and traces its modern renewal. The first file, the-divergence-from-western-religious-art.md, treats the parting of Eastern icon and Western sacred art per METHODOLOGY §4.1: the different theologies of the image that underlay the growing divergence after the schism, named without polemic — the Western reading in its own terms, the assessment the Church’s. The second file, the-modern-icon-revival.md, treats the twentieth-century recovery of the icon after a period of Western-influenced naturalism — the theoreticians and iconographers who led the “return to the canon” — and offers a measured assessment.

Contents

File Description
the-divergence-from-western-religious-art.md How the Eastern icon and Western sacred art parted after the schism; the theological stakes, without polemic, from the Orthodox standpoint
the-modern-icon-revival.md The 20th-century recovery — Ouspensky, Kontoglou, the return to the canon; the diaspora; an assessment

See Also