Russian and Byzantine icons

Size 4" x 4 3/4" (10 cm x 12 cm)

Price $6 each

Icons axe images of eternity, so everything in them is different, including space and time. The logic of the earthly world does not extend to icons, a fact stressed by reverse perspective. A great deal has been written about reverse perspective, the structure of the icon's space in which there is no single point on the horizon where all lines meet, and in which objects get larger, rather than smaller, as they recede into the distance.

The name for this device, reverse perspective, arose by analogy with direct perspective, the basis of the realistic picture. In an icon the only point at which lines intersect, geometrical md semantic, is the one where the worshipper stands the icon's space opens up round him, as it were, drawing him into the icon's world, and this explains why all the obiects seem to unfurl round him. They can be seen from three, if not four, sides. Icons include events that have taken place at different times and in different places.

The icon represents light and not darkness. The Agnes do not cast shadows. There is no night,only eternal day. The traditional icon cannot contain chiaroscuro, which arises as a result of an external light source with one side illuminated while the other one is in shadow, because Divine, Uncreated Light illumines everything. Saints are also depicted from the viewpoint of eternity. The inmates of heaven are free of blemishes, both physical and emotional; they are inspire Yet this movement away from matter to spirit never leads to the disappearance of the bodily element in the icon, to abstractionism, in which symbols and signs exist without anthropomorphic forms. That would mean going beyond the bounds of Christology. Orthodox icons are based on belief in the Incarnation, which not only does not deny the flesh, but sanctifies it and gives it a new,