The Icon and the Mask

This note is a condensed version of a forthcoming study to appear in Popular religion and ritual in Prehistoric and ancient Greece and the east Mediterranean, edited by G. Vavouranakis, K. Kopanias, K. Kanellopoulos and Y. Papadatos, Oxbow, 2017. It focuses on handmade figurines of the Classical period with mold-made, mask-like faces that were brought to light at the Cave of the Nymphs in Lechova, Corinthia. An examination of their iconographic characteristics in relation to other representations of similar iconography, as well as literary sources mentioning the use of masks in ritual, shed light on their use in initiation rites.

Wanted Byzantium. The Desire for a Lost Empire, eds Ingela Nilsson & Paul Stephenson

EGO-European History Online, 2019

The word "icon" (and the adjective "iconic") is not an unfamiliar concept to the contemporary reader. It is used to denote things like the "icons" of our pop-culture (i.e. "stars") or the "icons" that we find on our computer screens. Although the meaning of these "icons" is different from the way this concept is used in Christian art and theology, it is not completely unrelated to the ancient connotations of the term "icon/iconic". Both in its Christian and in the pop-cultural contexts the "icon" implies a specific relationship between the spectator, the image (visual medium), and the message (i.e. the "original") that the medium/image communicates. This article primarily examines the Orthodox Christian understanding of the image (icon) and its function within the context of the Orthodox Church and her theology. Based on this, the article also explains the aesthetic elements of traditional Orthodox Christian iconography in connection with the complex web of mutual exchanges and influences (both theological and visual/stylistic) between Orthodox Christianity and Western European religious and artistic tradition.

Oleg Tarasov. Spirituality and the Semiotics of Russian Culture: From the Icon to Avant-Garde Art. - In: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives. Ed. by L.Hardiman, N.Kozicharov. L., 2017, p. 115 - 128.

The relationship between the avant-garde and the icon is of great importance for the discussion of the semiotics of Russian culture and the spiritual tradition in Russian art. The first reason is a historical one. From this perspective, the icon and the avant-garde image are diametrically opposite sign systems. In the icon, symbol coincides with meaning. Not by accident, it was the act of naming that gave icons their force. In the medieval consciousness a title was inseparable from the identity of the person bearing it. However, the avant-garde image (the abstract image in particular) is a pure sign able to acquire new meanings spontaneously. The sign and its meaning are in an arbitrary relationship here. Moreover, in the medieval system of aesthetics an icon could be understood only in the context of the ritual associated with it. As we know, in medieval aesthetics, elements giving pleasure did not belong to the artistic idea. From this came the principle that the icon was not considered as a form of 'free' art that was drawn into the service both of the Church and the government. Only in Renaissance art theory did pleasure become one of the aims of art. For the icon, the individual perspectives of the artist and the spectator do not come into play. As a result, the art of the medieval icon painter lay in knowledge of the rules of the craft, as opposed to creative imagination. The aim of the icon is to enable an individual to perceive an image as a truth imposed upon the mind from outside, as revealed only to the Holy Fathers and the saints.

Diakrisis. Yearbook of Theology and Philosophy, 2021

The aim of this article is to present a personal reflection regarding the theoretical/philosophical relation between the generally accepted theological grounding of icon painting and other contemporary artistic endeavours to integrate the religious feeling-of Christian-Orthodox inspiration. This reflection is based on a mixture of ideas from different thought-frameworks which have as common ground the need for speculating on issues such as 'tradition understanding', 'personal expression', 'art and religiousness', exactly those key-themes that are constituting the fundamental threads of my argumentation. Hence, my appeal to authors like Lucian Blaga, Leonid Uspensky, Martin Heidegger, Paul Evdochimov, and Christos Yannaras. The point of departure for my study is the powerful and unavoidable conflict between the need for personal artistic interpretations of religious themes-expressed through contemporary artistic techniques and the application of contemporary metaphysical modelings-and the need for attaching oneself to an 'authentic' tradition of religious experience and to a community with deep roots in history. My all-round thesis is that this conflict cannot be, at least, clarified by choosing, from the artistic point of view, between two extremes: contemporary secular art on the one hand, and sacred, canonical art on the other hand, but by finding conceptual common pathways.

Church Music and Icons: Windows to Heaven, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Orthodox Church Music, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, 3-9 June 2013 , 2015

Revista de Antropología y Filosofía de lo Sagrado, 2018

A very special kind of feast belongs to the Christian Orthodox tradition: there is a specific liturgical celebration of the Images in the so-called Sunday of Or-thodoxy. While in many cultures images are employed in order to celebrate an historic event, this is the only feast in which, on the contrary, images are celebrated for themselves. Nonetheless, the role of images in Orthodoxy is not univocally and positively accepted. In fact, the title's expression «the wolf as a shepherd» belongs to a Desert Father and refers to the role of images in our mental life. This is not reported by a heretical iconoclastic document, but by the well-known Philokalia, a kind of handbook of Orthodox Aesthetics. This paper aims to present these two aspects in their paradoxical partnership. First, I will present some historical, symbolic and liturgical aspects of this feast. Thus, we should be able to understand better why many contemporary authors claimed that the origins of our visual culture can be traced in this Feast. However, if we comprehend the philosophical value of Byzantine icons, we realise that they have little to do with our contemporary images, no matter whether we mean artistic, religious or media images. We often talk about the «power of images», but just to blame them-as if they were autonomous entities-or to praise them, in a generalized aestheticization of contemporary life. Iconophobia and iconodoulia, I claim, are emerging as ontologically impoverished versions of the former Byzantine theoretical models. What falls into oblivion is the paradoxical status of the image as «appearance of the essence of Being» that demands as a condition of its own existence its self-sublation. These dialectics, conceptually inspired by the Hegelian logic, are fully present in Byzantine Aesthetics, where the feast is considered as a precarious image, held in memory of a future image loss event known as eschaton.

Київ : АртЕк, 2019