Visible Image of the Invisible God: A Guide to Russian and Byzantine Icons

By Dennis J. Sardella

A comprehensive and beautifully illustrated guide to Russian icons — the "beating heart of the Christian East"

Religious icons have been at the spiritual heart of the Christian East for nearly two thousand years. Their mysterious, peaceful quality and almost magnetic power can stop us in our tracks and draw our gaze, without us even knowing why. The sophisticated composition and symbolism of icons emphasize that their subjects are inhabitants of another, transcendent, world. They are not simply the art of the Christian East, but the expression and pulse of its spirituality. And on a personal level for many Christians of all backgrounds, icons are not only objects of admiration, but a deep wellspring of meditation, reflection, and veneration.

A docent at the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Massachusetts, for many years, Dennis J. Sardella now offers an inviting guide to the most famous icons in the collection. This vibrantly illustrated book will:

• Introduce you to icons and instill a desire for a deeper appreciation of them
• Teach you about their origin, their historical evolution, their complex symbolic language, and their role in the spiritual and liturgical life of the Eastern Churches, both Orthodox and Catholic
• Answer your questions about when and where the first icons were created
• Show the physical and spiritual steps in their creation
• Explain the different types of icons, the symbolism that is key to deciphering them, as well as their role in Eastern Christian spirituality and liturgy.

Those who are knowledgeable about Russian icons and Byzantine icons, as well as newcomers, will find Visible Image of the Invisible God to be a treasured resource.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Oct 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781640607309

Dennis J. Sardella

Dennis Sardella writes and speaks on Russian and Byzantine icons and their role in Eastern Christian spirituality, as well as on prayer and the Christian life. He has served as a Docent at the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Massachusetts for eleven years.  

Book preview

Visible Image of the Invisible God

A Guide to Russian and Byzantine Icons

DENNIS J. SARDELLA

2022 First Printing

Visible Image of the Invisible God: A Guide to Russian and Byzantine Icons

Copyright © 2022 by Dennis J. Sardella

ISBN 978-1-64060-729-3

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible with Revised New Testament and Revised Psalms © 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scriptures shown as New King James Version are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Paraclete Press name and logo are trademarks of Paraclete Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sardella, Dennis J., 1941- author.

Title: Visible image of the invisible God : a guide to Russian and Byzantine icons / Dennis J. Sardella.

Description: Brewster, Massachusetts : Paraclete Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: Beautifully illustrated with icon photographs, this book guides you to a knowledge of icons, how they are created, and the prayerful details that draw you to God-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022015941 (print) | LCCN 2022015942 (ebook) | ISBN 9781640607293 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781640607316 (pdf) | ISBN 9781640607309 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Icons. | BISAC: RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts | RELIGION / Christian Rituals & Practice / Worship & Liturgy

Classification: LCC N8187 .S27 2022 (print) | LCC N8187 (ebook) | DDC 704.9/482--dc23/eng/20220426

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015941

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015942

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press

Brewster, Massachusetts

www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the Republic of Korea

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

D

uring my nearly eleven years as a docent at the Museum of Russian Icons and as a lecturer and writer on icons I have frequently been asked by visitors to recommend a brief book to help them remember and extend what they had learned during their gallery tour. While there is a plethora of excellent books on the subject of icons, such as Léonide Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky’s classic, The Meaning of Icons (my first serious introduction to the subject), or Linette Martin’s Sacred Doorways: a Beginner’s Guide to Icons, among many others, few seemed to me to have the combination of non-specialist language, reasonable length, portability, and a size and price modest enough for a beginner to acquire without a major investment of effort and money. After mulling over the question, I eventually decided to have a try at creating a relatively brief book that would utilize the strengths of the Museum’s world-class collection to provide a good basic understanding of icons to whet readers’ appetites, to provide an incentive to learn more, and to create a foundation on which they can build in the future, and in that spirit, I offer this brief introduction.

I would like to acknowledge with thanks my fellow docents and the Museum staff, who have provided encouragement and many invaluable insights. I am also grateful to the Museum for having granted me permission to use their icons to illustrate and enliven the text, and to the Boston College Association of Retired Faculty for a research grant in support of this work. Finally, and most importantly, I am deeply indebted to my wife, Marjorie, for her loving support, her insightful suggestions, and her heroic patience with me during the whole process.

Visible Image of the Invisible God

Figure 1. Christ the Saviour (Pantokrator), 6th-century encaustic icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai.

CHAPTER ONE

What Is an Icon?

R

eligious icons have been at the heart of the spiritual tradition of the Christian East for nearly two thousand years, a tradition which continues vibrant and unabated down to the present day. Here are two highly revered examples: Jesus Christ, a sixth-century icon from the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai desert (Fig. 1), and the Vladimir Mother of God (Fig. 2), an icon painted in Constantinople in the twelfth century.

To someone encountering icons for the first time they may appear artistically unsophisticated, with expressionless faces, formalized positions, and the absence of three-dimensionality and perspective. Yet they have about them a mysterious and peaceful quality, an almost magnetic power that arrests the eye and draws the gaze of the viewer. The formality of their construction, with its geometrically structured and proportioned underlying drawing, its gracefully elongated figures, its clearly defined color areas and absence of shading, and its flattened, or even inverted, perspective gives them a monumentality that emphasizes that the subjects gazing at us are inhabitants of another, transcendent, world.

Icons’ apparent primitiveness of execution, in comparison to the religious art of the Renaissance and later centuries, belies a depth and sophistication of composition and symbolism that make them eloquent expressions of a tradition of deep spirituality and theological reflection. They are not simply the art of the Christian East, but the expression, the beating heart of its spirituality, and one who approaches them simply as objets d’art, things to be looked at and appreciated for their beauty and execution alone, misses the greater and most important part of their raison d’être. They are meant to be not simply objects of admiration, but of meditation, reflection, and veneration.

Figure 2. Vladimir Mother of God, 12th c., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The Origin of the Name

While the word icon is a familiar one in contemporary society, where we often speak of iconic images, like the famous photo of the burning of the Hindenburg, or icons, as when we speak of Louis Armstrong as a jazz icon, this is a co-opted and relatively recent use of the term; but its roots are far older. The word is actually an ancient one that comes from the Greek εικόν (eikon), which means image. In Saint Paul’s letter to the Colossians, when he describes Jesus as the image of the invisible God,¹ the word he uses is icon. Likewise, in the Greek translation of the Bible (the Septuagint, a version translated by seventy-two Jewish scholars in Alexandria during the mid-third century BCE), in the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament), when it says that God created men and women in his own image and likeness (Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness), the word employed for image is also icon. Since God the Father does not have a physical form, the expression in his own image and likeness is clearly not meant to indicate a photographic image, but the characteristics of a creature having attributes like God’s: intellect, beauty, compassion, will, and, above all, love. The people in whose lives these divine qualities have been most fully manifested are those we regard as saints, from the Latin sanctus (holy). Images of such people are called icons because they themselves have become icons of God in the world. Like painted icons, saintly people, their actual physical appearances notwithstanding, have a kind of indefinable magnetic quality that draws others to them, allowing them to have an influence for good that extends beyond themselves.

CHAPTER TWO

When Were the First Icons Created?

T

he simplest answer to the question of when the first icons were created is that we don’t really know for certain. There is no surviving evidence of Christian imagery from the first two centuries of the Christian era, and this is perhaps not surprising, since the earliest Christians were Jews, and Judaism forbade the depiction of human forms for religious purposes.

It has been suggested that the first pictorial images of Jesus may have arisen during the third century, with the conversion to Christianity of large numbers of pagans, who brought with them to their new faith their tradition of creating images of their gods.