The Divergence from Western Religious Art

The Eastern icon and Western religious art, once a shared inheritance, parted ways after the schism, and by the Renaissance had become two quite different things. This file treats that divergence soberly (per METHODOLOGY §4.1): the shared early inheritance, the different theologies and functions of the sacred image that grew up East and West, and the theological stakes — named without polemic, the Western tradition’s self-understanding reported accurately in its own terms, and the whole assessed from within the Orthodox Church’s confession of the canonical icon.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

A Shared Inheritance

For the first Christian millennium, East and West shared a common visual culture of the sacred image, rooted in late-antique Mediterranean art: mosaic, fresco, and panel images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints filled the churches of Rome and Ravenna as of Constantinople and Thessalonica, and the theology of the image, as defined at Nicaea II (787), was in principle the inheritance of the whole Church (Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art, Oxford, 2000; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence, Chicago, 1994). The divergence that later became so visible was not present at the start; it developed gradually, and it had roots in both theology and history.

An early and revealing fault line, however, appeared already at the Frankish reception of Nicaea II. The Latin translation of the council’s Acts that reached Charlemagne’s court rendered the Greek proskynesis (relative veneration) by adoratio (worship), and the Frankish theologians, reading the council as commanding the worship of images, rejected it in the Libri Carolini (c. 790–793) and at the Synod of Frankfurt (794), while also declining the iconoclast position — settling instead on a middle view in which images are legitimate for instruction and ornament but are not proper objects of veneration (Thomas F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; see Image and Prototype). [Corrected: the Frankish charge that Nicaea II commanded the “adoration” of images rested on a mistranslation of proskynesis as adoratio; the council had explicitly denied latreia to icons — but the episode set the Western image on a different footing from the start, treating it more as didactic ornament than as a venerable window to the prototype (Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, 2009).] This early divergence in the function of the image — the East’s venerated icon versus a Western image weighted toward teaching and, later, devotion and beauty — is the seed of the larger parting.

The Parting After the Schism

After the schism conventionally dated to 1054, and increasingly through the later Middle Ages, the two traditions developed in different directions, and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the difference had become one of kind. The Byzantine and Slavic East consolidated the iconographic canon — the stylized, non-naturalistic, gold-ground image that shows the transfigured person in the light of the Kingdom (see The Language of the Icon) — and held it as theology, a fixed and traditional confession in line and color (Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 2). The Latin West, meanwhile, moved through Gothic naturalism toward the Renaissance, developing linear perspective, anatomical realism, individual artistic authorship, emotional drama, and the sensuous depiction of the human body — Giotto, then the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — so that Western religious art became, increasingly, art: the expression of a gifted individual, prized for beauty and realism, aiming to move the beholder by representing sacred events as though naturally witnessed (Belting, Likeness and Presence, 1994, on the passage “from image to art”; Cormack, Byzantine Art, 2000).

The Theological Stakes: The Two Readings

The divergence rests on genuinely different theologies of the sacred image. Per METHODOLOGY §4.1 the Western reading is reported accurately, in its own terms; but the standpoint of this collection is not neutral between the two: the theology of the icon confessed at Nicaea II is, for the Orthodox Church, the dogmatically defined understanding of the sacred image, and the parting is assessed from that side.

The Orthodox reading. From the Eastern side, the icon is theology and confession, not art in the modern sense; its non-naturalism is deliberate and doctrinal, showing the person as transfigured in God rather than as seen by the physical eye at a passing moment (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1–2). On this reading, the Western development is a loss: naturalism draws the image back into the created, sensual, individual world it was the icon’s whole purpose to transcend; the substitution of the artist’s imagination and the model’s flesh for the received canon severs the image from tradition and from its function as a window to the prototype; and the result, however beautiful, is religious illustration rather than a venerable icon — a picture of a sacred subject rather than a means of communion with a holy person (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 2; Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, Oakwood, 1990). Some Orthodox writers frame this sharply, seeing in the naturalistic Western religious image a symptom of a wider theological drift; others state it more moderately, as a difference of vocation rather than a fall.

The Western reading. From the Western side, the development of naturalistic sacred art is not a loss but a legitimate flowering of a different but defensible theology of the image, one that the Latin tradition traces to Gregory the Great’s teaching that images are “the books of the illiterate” — instruction and devotional aid rather than objects of veneration in the Eastern sense (Gregory the Great, Letters to Serenus of Marseilles, XI.10 and IX.209; Celia Chazelle, “Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate,” Word & Image 6, 1990). On this reading the incarnational logic that the East used to defend the stylized icon equally warrants depicting the full, real humanity of Christ and the saints in their bodily and emotional truth — the Word truly became flesh, and the flesh may be shown as flesh; naturalism can be a deepening of the Incarnation’s affirmation of the material and human, not a betrayal of it. The West would also urge that its images continued to serve prayer and catechesis and that the difference is one of style and emphasis, not of a denial of the sacred image as such.

This collection stands with the Church’s confession: the canonical icon is the normative sacred image, and naturalistic religious painting — whatever its beauty — is a different and, for liturgical use, lesser thing. The Western tradition’s own account of its development, as a legitimate and fruitful path grounded in its own (Gregorian, didactic-devotional) theology of the image, is reported here accurately and without caricature. The stakes are real — they touch what a sacred image is for, whether it is venerated or contemplated, whether it confesses or illustrates — and they are best stated, not softened, precisely so that neither tradition is misrepresented.

The Practical Consequence in the East

One concrete consequence bears noting, because it sets up the next file. The theological divergence did not stay in the West: from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western naturalism penetrated Orthodox lands themselves, and much church painting in Russia, the Balkans, and Greece adopted the perspective, modeling, and sentiment of Western religious art, so that the traditional icon was in many places eclipsed by an academic, “Italianate” religious painting (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 2, on the Western influence and the decline of the canon). It was against exactly this internalized Western manner that the twentieth-century Orthodox recovery of the icon defined itself — the “return to the canon” that is the subject of the next file (see The Modern Icon Revival). The story of East and West is therefore not only a tale of two traditions but, in the modern period, a struggle within Orthodoxy over the theology of its own image.

References

Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. (The passage from the venerated image to “art”; the divergence of East and West.)
Cormack, Robin. Byzantine Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. (The shared inheritance and the Eastern development.)
Noble, Thomas F. X. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. (The Libri Carolini, the mistranslation, the Synod of Frankfurt, and the Western “middle way.”)
Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The Orthodox reading; the Western influence on Orthodox church painting.)
Evdokimov, Paul. The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty. Trans. Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1990.
Chazelle, Celia. “Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of Marseilles.” Word & Image 6, no. 2 (1990): 138–153. (Gregory the Great’s theology of the image as instruction.)
Gregory the Great. Letters IX.209 and XI.10 (to Serenus of Marseilles). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vols. 12–13.