Iconostasis and Reverse Perspective

Iconostasis, written in 1922, is Florensky’s last major theological work and the most widely read of his books after the Pillar. It reads the icon screen as the visible form of a real boundary between two worlds, the saints as living windows in that boundary, and the icon as a witness whose truthfulness is a matter of vision rather than technique. The companion essay “Reverse Perspective” (1920) argues that linear perspective is a historically conditioned worldview rather than a law of seeing, and that the icon’s inverted space is a deliberate theological alternative. This file expounds both — and repeats the repository’s caution that the art-historical account of reverse perspective is contested.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Theological Academy; the Russian religious renaissance)

The Book and Its Fate

Ikonostas was composed in 1922, in the years after the closure of the Trinity–St Sergius Lavra, while Florensky was working on the commission for the preservation of its art and antiquities and lecturing on the theory of spatiality in art (Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev, SVS Press, 1996, translator’s introduction; Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius, Continuum, 2010, ch. 8). It could not be published in the Soviet Union at the time and circulated only in manuscript; it appeared in full only much later, and the English translation by Sheehan and Andrejev was published by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 1996.

The book’s afterlife has been remarkable. Together with Leonid Ouspensky’s Theology of the Icon and Eugene Trubetskoy’s essays, it is one of the founding texts of the twentieth-century theological recovery of the icon — a recovery the repository treats in The Modern Icon Revival, where Florensky’s contribution is described as “profound (and later much-debated).”

The Boundary

The book’s governing idea is announced by its title. An iconostasis is not a partition that hides the altar; it is the visible form of a boundary that exists whether or not it is painted. Florensky’s argument runs: there are two worlds; they touch; the place where they touch is the sanctuary; and the icon screen is that touching made perceptible to eyes that cannot otherwise see it. Were the faithful spiritually awake, he says, they would see the living saints standing in that boundary — the screen exists because we are not awake, and it shows us, in paint, the witnesses who are actually there (Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Sheehan and Andrejev, 1996).

This is why the book opens with a long meditation on dreams. Sleep, for Florensky, is the ordinary human experience of crossing between the two worlds: in dream, time runs differently — he argues that dream-time can run in reverse, from effect to cause, and that this is a signature of a different order of being. Dreams descending from above are visionary; dreams rising from below are the churning of the passions; and the discernment between them is the first exercise of a spiritual life (Florensky, Iconostasis, opening chapters; Slesinski, Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love, SVS Press, 1984, ch. 8). Readers coming to the book expecting a treatise on iconography are frequently baffled by the first fifty pages; they are the foundation of everything that follows.

Face, Countenance, Mask

Florensky’s most quoted contribution to icon theology is his three-term distinction, which depends on a Russian and Greek wordplay: litso (the face, the empirical human appearance), lik (the countenance, the face transfigured — the term Russian uses for the face in an icon), and lichina (the mask, the false face, the appearance emptied of the person behind it) (Florensky, Iconostasis, 1996; Slesinski, 1984, ch. 8).

The icon shows the lik: not the man as a camera would find him, and not an idealization either, but the man as he is in the Kingdom — the face in which the image of God has become visible. This is why the icon is not a portrait and why the ascetic labour of the iconographer matters: he is not inventing a likeness but bearing witness to one. Florensky puts the point in a form that has become a commonplace of icon theology: the icon is either a genuine witness to what the painter has seen, or it is a lie — there is no neutral, merely decorative middle.

He draws from this a consequence that troubles some readers: the icon has a kind of evidential status. In one of the book’s most striking passages he argues that the very existence of the icon of the Trinity — Rublev’s — is proof that the God it depicts exists, on the ground that no one could have painted that unless he had seen it. Read as a formal argument this is obviously invalid; read as Florensky intends it — a statement about what it means to be confronted by that particular icon — it is the sharpest statement in modern theology of the icon as testimony (Florensky, Iconostasis, 1996; on Rublev’s Trinity see Holy Icons).

The Canons, and Why He Defends Them

Iconostasis is also a defence of the iconographic canons against the naturalizing Italianate painting that had dominated Russian church art since the eighteenth century. Florensky’s argument is not antiquarian. The canons, he says, are the accumulated discipline by which a tradition transmits what it has seen; the painter who abandons them for the illusionism of the academy is not liberating himself but substituting his own eyes for the Church’s. The gold ground, the absence of cast shadow, the stylization of the body, the non-naturalistic architecture — all of these are the deliberate grammar of a depiction of transfigured reality (Florensky, Iconostasis, 1996; and see The Language of the Icon, whose account this file follows).

He wrote this at exactly the moment when the cleaning of the ancient Russian icons was revealing the medieval originals under centuries of darkened varnish and overpainting — the discovery that made the modern icon revival possible, and that Florensky, working on the Lavra’s collections, saw at first hand.

Reverse Perspective

The essay Obratnaia perspektiva (“Reverse Perspective”), written in 1920, is his best-known single piece outside theology. Its argument has two moves.

The negative move: linear perspective is not a discovery of how seeing works. It is a convention — a historically located construction, arising in the Italian Renaissance, that encodes a particular philosophy: a single, fixed, monocular, immobile observer, at a determinate distance, for whom the world arranges itself into depth. Florensky assembles evidence that ancient and medieval art did not fail to achieve perspective but declined it, that Egyptian, Greek, and Byzantine artists had access to perspectival devices and used them selectively, and that the “conquest” of perspective is therefore an ideological event rather than a technical advance (Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond, Reaktion Books, 2002).

The positive move: the icon’s space is organized on an opposite principle. Lines that would converge toward a vanishing point behind the picture instead diverge, as though the vanishing point lay in front of the image — in the viewer, or beyond him. Multiple viewpoints are combined in a single object; faces and buildings are shown from more than one angle at once; scale follows significance rather than distance. Florensky reads this as the deliberate expression of an objective vision — the world as seen not by an individual subject at a window but by God, and by the communion of those who see with Him (Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” in Beyond Vision, 2002).

The essay was taken up by the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school and by art historians and has had a large secular reception, largely independent of Florensky’s theology (Misler, introduction to Beyond Vision, 2002).

The Caution, Stated Plainly

This collection agrees with the repository’s Holy Icons treatment, and repeats its caution here rather than suppressing it because Florensky is the subject.

[Disputed: whether “reverse perspective” is a rigorous, consistent system in Byzantine icon-painting, and how far the theological interpretation of it (Florensky, Ouspensky) reflects the intentions of the medieval painters. Some art historians hold that Byzantine images are better described as non-perspectival, or as employing multiple viewpoints and inherited late-antique conventions, than as governed by a coherent inverse-perspective geometry, and caution that the modern theological reading is a twentieth-century construction projected onto the tradition (see the discussion in Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art, Oxford, 2000, and Clemena Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon, Ashgate, 2010). The repository reports the traditional theological account as the received Orthodox interpretation while noting that the art-historical description of the phenomenon is contested; this file follows that judgment. See The Language of the Icon.]

Two further observations belong with the caution. First, the caution is about art history, not about the theology of the image, which rests on the Seventh Ecumenical Council and not on any theory of perspective (see Icons and Iconoclasm). Whether or not medieval painters worked with a consistent inverse geometry, the icon is a witness to the incarnate Christ and His saints, and that is the Church’s teaching. Second, Florensky’s deeper claim — that every pictorial space encodes a worldview, and that the Renaissance space encodes one incompatible with the Christian vision of the person — survives even if the geometrical thesis is loosened, and it is that claim which has proved most durable in the literature.

What Endures

Three things from these writings have entered the common language of modern Orthodox reflection on the icon: the icon as window and boundary; the distinction of face, countenance, and mask; and the insistence that the icon’s form is theology rather than style. All three are compatible with, and have been absorbed into, the mainstream account given by Ouspensky and Lossky and by the repository’s own Holy Icons. What remains Florensky’s alone, and contested, is the metaphysical apparatus in which he set them.

References

Florensky, Pavel. Iconostasis. Trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev; introduction by Donald Sheehan. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996. (Composed 1922.)
Florensky, Pavel. Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art. Ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. (Contains “Reverse Perspective,” written 1920, with Misler’s introduction on Florensky as art historian and on the essay’s Soviet-era republication.)
Slesinski, Robert. Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984, ch. 8. (The theology of the symbol and the icon.)
Pyman, Avril. Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius. New York: Continuum, 2010, ch. 8. (The Lavra commission and the years in which Iconostasis was written.)
Cormack, Robin. Byzantine Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. (The art-historical caution.)
Antonova, Clemena. Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. (The scholarly debate over reverse perspective.)
Trubetskoy, Eugene. Icons: Theology in Color. Trans. Gertrude Vakar. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.