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In the Orthodox East the icon was always linked to the world outlook and this is reflected in its artistic-symbolical language. The affirmation of Christological dogma had a critical influence on the development of iconography. The representations of Christ typical of the early Christian period (such as the fish, lamb, Good Shepherd, etc.) were replaced by icons. As it departed from sculpture and the somewhat naturalistic early Christian representations, church art became increasingly conventional, tending towards flatness. The outline of the bodies depicted on icons, became finer, as it were, emphasizing the spiritual content of the image. We could say that, as it accumulated spiritual qualities, the icon sought to transform the flesh, to
deprive it of its coarse material substance, to dissolve it in light and re-mould it in spiritual plasma. Icons are sacred images that reflect the physical and the spiritual, the human and the Divine, the visible and the invisible.
They enable us to have contact with the experience of the Church, first and foremost, the experience of the
Holy Fathers, They help us to understand the joyous message that Orthodoxy brings to the world, to adopt the view of the world that is intrinsic to Christianity in
general.
Whereas a picture can be called a window into the world around us, an icon is a window into the invisible world. It does not show things that people are familiar with in their everyday lives, but reveals the Kingdom to come. Icons began to be painted in order to show this other world, the new heaven and the new earth, where
Christ's victory is complete, the victory of good over evil, life over death. So the realistic or, rather, naturalistic method of depicting is not suitable for the icon. It requires symbols and signs in which the image of the
Kingdom to come can be divined. Representations were originally conceived of as symbolical. According to Tradition the first icon painter was the Evangelist and Apostle Luke, who depicted not what he saw (the
Virgin and the thirty-year-old Christ), but a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary with the Christ Child.
From the very beginning the conventional symbolic images were placed in shallow, conventional space (without a middle or background). The Church tells us that Heaven is not far from us. Not only is the heavenly kingdom close at hand, it is also open to us: the faces on ' icons are usually painted frontally and even when saints are addressing each other we do not see them in profile, but facing us in a three-quarter turn. The only figures shown in profile are either negative characters (such as
Judas in the scene of his arrest by the guards) or secondary ones who are not saints
(for example, the women
washing the Child in the Nativity of Christ).
An icon does not show a fragment of the heavenly
world, but reveals an image of the fullness of being, of a full worldview. The image rarely pleads
into the margins. It is complete and cannot simply be
extended like an Impressionist painting, an almost random piece of the earthly world .
