IKON

This article analyzes the public use of an icon in the early modern era, probably a Lamenting Virgin, painted at the end of the 13^th century by an artist from the Adriatic area and now in the Cathedral of Fermo, in the Marche Region. Cross-checking the biography of Giacomo della Marca and the records of the council of the town of Fermo, it is possible to reconstruct the intriguing events that occurred in 1473. On 12^th March Giacomo preached against the scoundrel and drunkard Albanian Peter, to which the Virgin appeared in a vision, asking him to build a church. In order to stop the cult of the image commissioned by the Albanian, Giacomo della Marca gave the community a valuable and ancient icon, painted by St Luke the Evangelist himself. This way the preacher succeeded in bringing back the management of what is “sacred” within the boundaries of the Church. In the 18^th century the friars put on the altar where the icon was venerated a now lost painting portraying Giacomo della Marca, canonized in 1726, receiving the icon as a gift from the pope. Probably at the same occasion, the friars glued a painting on canvas on the back of the wooden case that contained the icon, now in the Diocesan Museum of Fermo. Through the new story told by this image, the friars reinforced the relationship between Giacomo della Marca, the pope and St Luke, used for the canonization of the saint.

Western artists of the 14^th and the early 15^th centuries used a verse from medieval hymn literature that compared Mary’s virginity to the glass of a window in order to illustrate how she was able to conceive and still remain a virgin. While much is known about how this metaphor is visualized in the art of Dutch masters, its use in the works of their Italian colleagues has been studied less. Byzantine artists had totally different ways of illustrating the virginity of the Mother of God, although the hymn Dies est laetitiae includes words that may explain both the Eastern and the Western modes. This article examines the differences and similarities between these traditions and highlights one painting that may be considered as a synthesis between Eastern and Western iconographies with regard to this particular topic.

The power of the images and the empathetic relationship it engenders with artists and viewers implys a new approach to the aesthetic experience through the sensory and emotional aspects that take place in the process of invention, construction, and interpretation of the artwork. Such a critical reflection leads to a revision of the traditional critical category of formalism and towards a new approach to the work of art as a system of morphological signifiers, which can be understood as an “iconology of style”. A study of the Annunciation as an artistic subject calls into question problems concerning the re-composition of the biblical narrative into an image, but also the problem of how to depict what is not figurable, which is the mystery of the Incarnation of Christ. What role do the textual and iconographic traditions play in determining the choices available to the artists? Antonello da Messina, an artist at the crossroads between the 15^th century tradition and the early-modern age, engaged in testing both the Albertian representation of space and the narrative iconic mode of Flemish art, created a new kind of Annunciation, as an essential and non-figurable icon capable of incarnating the artist and its relationship with the viewer, and the invisibility of the dogma.

In 1503 a large icon of the Hodegetria belonging to the Dominican friars of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, was transferred from the chapter house of the monastery to its own chapel adjacent to the cloister. The image was promoted as the icon before which St John of Damascus recovered his amputated hand, as a mediator in family disputes, and as an object of veneration by both Venetian Catholics and the Greek Orthodox community in that city. A series of polyglot pamphlets recording the history of the icon and its function as mediatrix par excellence further promoted the icon in the 17^th century, reinforcing the link the icon provided between Counter Reformation Catholics and Greek Orthodox immigrants in early modern Venice.

This paper addresses three interesting cases of Byzantine icons brought to the Republic of Genoa’s territory, focusing on their reception from the 16^th to the 18^th century. The history and fame of these images (the celebrated Mandylion, identified with the acheropita image from Edessa, and the lesser known Madonna di Pera in Genoa; the late medieval Dormitio Virginis in the Rapallo’s area) widely differ, but they all enjoyed cult status that was rooted in the stories of their origins - which, for the Marian icons, evoked the figure of Saint Luke as their author - and caused the creation of new art objects to celebrate them. Rather than the icons themselves, the works of art commissioned to express the local people’s devotion toward these miracle-working images, as well as the Church’s recognition of their importance, are the main object of this analysis.

In this paper the Byzantine and Creto-Venetian icons will be presented as an important source of inspiration in Croatian painting in the early 20^th century. The author places that phenomenon within the context of European primitivism, a tendency of searching for inspiration in tribal, folk and medieval art in order to find an authentic, primordial expression. Intuitively recognising the spiritual dimension of icons some Croatian artists such as Jerolim Miše, Maksimilijan Vanka, Jozo Kljaković and Ljubo Babić used a number of Byzantine elements in some of their paintings, such as the flatness and linearity of design, hieratic posture and the flawless symmetrical frontality of a displayed character, the intense gaze directed at the observer, the golden background and the halo of light around the head. At the same time Iljko Gorenčević emphasised the connections and the similarities between the old icon art and the contemporary Expressionism, and Jerolim Miše recommended Russian and Byzantine art as a source of inspiration, for its deep spiritual insight. Kosta Strajnić explained this trend as an interest in other Slavic cultures, directed towards the creation of a new South Slavic culture in the period before the formation of a new Yugoslav state in 1918.

The altar screen mosaic icons were ordered and installed on a new reconstructed altar screen in the Žiča Monastery in 1993. The sketches made by a painter, Mladen Srbinović were approved by a committee consisting of eminent experts. Furthermore, The Serbian Patriarch Paul gave his blessing to the icons. However, soon after they were put up, there was an outcry and controversy ensued, which ended in the removal of the “controversial” icons and with them being replaced with one produced in the Žiča iconography workshop. The aim of this paper is to show the objective or subjective reasons for such a sequence of events: the departure from the canon and the instructions given in artistic manuals or the social environment unprepared to accept the otherwise expressed spirituality.

This paper will examine how the Russian avant-garde utilised the profound symbolism, metaphysical significance and the formal aesthetic tradition of Orthodox iconography, in combination with other symbolic art forms, as a means of creating an archetypal expression, which would allow their canvases to resound with universal spiritualism, and thus have the power to facilitate Jungian psychological healing. It will look at case studies by Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Mikhail Larionov in order to illustrate how these artists used elements of the icon tradition in order to achieve their ultimate ameliorative telos. Firstly, it will examine Goncharova’s Neo-primitive depiction of St Panteleimon (1911), and how it juxtaposed formal and symbolic conventions of iconology with mystical “primitive” aesthetic renderings to create a canvas capable of psychic healing. Secondly, it will illustrate how the ultimate intermediary and heroic capacity of the icon-object inspired the nihilistic geometricism of Malevich’s The Black Square (1915). Finally, it will consider how the formal conventions and transcendent symbolism of the Russian Orthodox icon inspired the radical modernity of Larionov’s innovative, Rayist canvas Red and Blue Rayism (1912-1913). Through these case studies this paper will aim to demonstrate the profound influence of the Orthodox icon tradition on the artists Goncharova, Malevich and Larionov as they formulated their radical avant-garde modernity.

At the beginning of the 20^th century in both Greece and Russian Diaspora (mainly in Paris and Prague) a renewal of iconography that was supposed to be of Byzantine persuasion took place. That happened in parallel with the continuance of traditional icon-writing. For instance, while Photius Kontoglou urged icon-painters to go back to the roots of their art, and in Prague a group worked in the “usual” Russian style, Joanna Reitlinger in Paris adopted a radically different manner of painting. A similar situation existed in Russia in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries and in Romania in the nineteenth.

The exhibition Malevich at Tate Modern in London in 2014 is analysed in an attempt to discern how Kazimir Malevich’s artistic trajectory was presented as “groundbreaking, iconic, innovative” and his painting Black Square (1915) was emphasised as “an icon for a modern age.” It is pointed out what was underlined and what was understated at the exhibition; how Malevich’s work was de-contextualised, exempted from the context of the eventful Russian avant-garde, and re-contextualised into the neater development of Western modernist painting. The use of vocabulary pertaining to the images of a holy person is shown to be congruent with the modernist history of modern art.

David Morgan describes aesthetic experience as “an ethics of encounter that seems unabashedly mystical. Aesthetic contemplation is a form of transcendence and revelation, a communion with a higher being.” Art therefore, in subsequent aesthetic and philosophical discourses culminating in European modernism, is imbued with a reputation for spirituality, underpinned by notions of both the beautiful and the sublime. This aesthetic doctrine appears to be at the heart of some of the criticism of recent works that parody art historical originals. A work that was produced by “genius” and that is aesthetically beautiful and portrays the idealism of classical perfection, such as the Pietà by Michelangelo, would carry this aura of spiritual communion, particularly as its purpose was for religious contemplation. The parody of such idealised images of the Madonna and Christ by certain contemporary South African artists could be seen, therefore, as an attack not only on the image of these iconic figures and on religion in general, but also on the sanctity of the creative urge, artistic genius, historical ideals, tradition and culture. Contemporary “iconoclastic” versions of religious iconography are not images that must be absorbed in “rapt contemplation” but instead must be comprehended rationally with intellectual knowledge of historical prototypes and their meanings, and in response to a current political or social context. They are therefore decidedly “worldly” in purpose and effect. In this paper I discuss the underlying purposes for Diane Victor’s Little Deposition Picture (2002), and Conrad Botes’ Good Shepherd (2014). These artists transgressively parody recognisable Christian icons to comment on the ongoing inequalities still rife in post-apartheid South African society. The transformation of society after the apartheid era has been difficult; often beliefs or behavioural practices are so normalised that change is virtually impossible without a catalyst to disrupt complacency and introduce alternative practices and thoughts. I would argue that iconoclasm in art is employed to function as just such a catalyst for the renewal of ideas and attitudes in the work of these artists.

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is often approached as a failed masterpiece. The unseen presence of “text” or “word” icons, however, challenges this assumption. A reading of the novel on the “iconic” level demonstrates the possibility of spiritual renewal through the image of the Mother of God as represented textually in Dormition and Do Not Lament Me, Mother icon types. For Dostoevsky, verbal icons retain their transformative function for his characters as well as for his readers. Through verbal icons, Dostoevsky explores the role of the artist, the possibility of the literary text as a source of spiritual transformation, and the nature of the nineteenth-century Russian cultural mindset.

Il pensiero di Guardini sulla liturgia si rivela fruttuoso anche oggi, mettendo in evidenza la stretta relazione tra la forma liturgica e la realtà esperienziale nella quale si esprime la totalità della persona. Guardini quando parla di “forma” intende sempre “forma vivente”, che nasce da un incontro originale, l’incontro tra l’uomo che sa guardare e sentire e la realtà che si mostra. Senza impegno esistenziale nessuna relazione è possibile, e quindi la forma vivente diventa formale, diventa astratta. Allo stesso modo, quando la vita vira troppo verso l’interno, in un certo modo crolla su se stessa e non si ritrova più. Guardini si preoccupa molto che la formazione non prenda la strada dell’astrazione e dell’interiorità chiusa in se stessa. La liturgia è un “modo di vita” traboccante di energia, non una struttura fissa a cui dobbiamo dare un significato; è una forza vitale, una risorsa che rinnova e dà senso alla nostra vita. Perciò la liturgia non dipende da formule e concetti, ma necessita di immagini e suoni che possano coinvolgerci. Abbiamo bisogno di mantenere la polarità tra interno ed esterno, tra spirito e corpo, tra unità e differenza, attraverso l’atto liturgico come azione rituale che forma e dà senso alla nostra esperienza.

Li Gonglin’s Painting of a Country Retreat is a milestone work in the history of Chinese painting, and Poet Su Zhe composed twenty poems for it. To some extent, the depicted landscape, figures and scenes of activity are associated with Taoist or Buddhist significance. However, the original piece is lost a long time ago, and now only four late copies are accessible. It seems that not all copies are completely faithful to the original work, and the Berenson’s version is arguably the top one. Due to the misplacement when the hand-scroll was re-mounted, the intertextuality between images and poetic lines becomes quite puzzling. To re-establish the matching relationship between scenes and calligraphic texts is now a priority to understand this brilliant copy.

Alessandro Rossi, Sguardi dalla seconda fila. Composizione e narazione iconica nella pittura veneta del Cinquecento, Skira, 2015