Ancient-Icon Exhibit From Greece Celebrates Faith

“Holy Image, Holy Space: Icons and Frescoes From Greece” is the most ambitious exhibition of its sort ever mounted in America. It is not a show for secularists. Skeptics of a show-me sort--those who smile knowingly when told of Christian miracles, of painted plaques of oak that cure disease, or speak, or weep--might as well stay at home.

Here skepticism blinds. To view these objects rightly--to see them, to see through them to the sanctity beyond--requires an act of faith. These ancient icons from Byzantium ought to be surrounded by perfumed smoke and chanted hymns, by worshipers, believers. Lone candles in the darkness ought to be provided to set their gilded surfaces aglow with holy light.

Beautiful they are. But in some important way, their beauty does not matter. For beauty is of our world, and these summon one beyond.

Their antiquity is impressive. But it doesn’t matter either. Icon painting, with its gessos and its gildings, and its endlessly repeated images and poses, has changed little in the past 12 centuries. To view these venerated portraits as mere works of art seems an impropriety. They are not like other paintings. Their holiness, for one thing, is independent of their substance. Whether done on vellum, on wood boards or of silver, their function is the same. Even at their heaviest--the strong young men who bore them through the streets of Constantinople swayed beneath their weight--they stress the immaterial. And they play strange tricks with time.

The viewer who is tempted to fit them into history often finds himself confounded. That the famous gold-ground paintings of the Italian quattrocento, those by Duccio and Sassetta, are just about unthinkable without these precedents is one of the most telling truths revealed by this show. Those Italian primitives helped bring about the Renaissance. But the Greek painters who inspired them--even when, in turn, they bent toward the Italian way--were anchored against change.

Most Westerners see paintings as slices of reality, as depictions of a moment. But icons evoke timelessness. The oldest of the 71 icons on display (they date from the 10th Century) were careful imitations of images much older. And the very oldest of them, or so tradition has it, were painted not by men, but by acts of God.

Of these acheiropoietoi (“not made by human hands”), perhaps the most revered is the Mandelion of Edessa, a blessed napkin used by Jesus--and on which the image of his face remained miraculously imprinted. Comparably venerated is the Hodegetria of Constantinople, which was carried into battle by the armies of that city. A portrait of the Virgin painted by St. Luke himself (“My favor will be with it,” she promised when she saw it), that famous painting is the parent of many in this show.

One such image from Kastoria, dating from the 12th Century, shows Mary draped in purple against a ground of gold. Though she holds her child in her arms, her brow is furrowed with anxiety and her eyes are filled with pain. Perhaps she is foreseeing the pierced side and the nails, the crown of thorns, the Cross. The other side of this enormous, two-sided, processional icon portrays the dead Jesus, and is the oldest “Man of Sorrows” painting that exists.

Such objects have about them something more than likenesses. And some part of their sanctity devolves into the copies made down through the long centuries, in the same way that the Word of God maintains its old holiness even when translated into modern tongues.

The icons in this show are presences, not just paintings. They are windows into holiness. The believers of Byzantium, like those of Greece today, were not speaking metaphorically when they referred to such objects as empsychos (“having a soul”) or holozontanos (“completely alive”).

The most venerated icons, writes Cyril Mango of Oxford University in the exhibition catalogue, “are prayed to and work miracles. Occasionally they speak or weep. They bleed if stabbed by an unbeliever. They float across the sea without getting wet. Like palladia they are carried into battle by armies. They serve as guarantors of contracts. A particle of paint or plaster taken from them may be ingested and cure a disease. In short, an icon is perceived not merely as a likeness, but as a vehicle of supernatural power, as the ‘double’ of the saint represented on it, or the ‘shell’ in which he dwells.”

The saints and sages of these icons are rarely seen as in the world. Instead they seem to float on seas of gold. They peer into the viewer’s eyes. To meet their gaze with full devotion is itself an act of prayer.

Not all the fathers of the early church were at peace with such venerations. Were they not a form of Christianized idolatry? And had not God himself condemned such graven images in his Second Commandment? Jews objected to such images. So, too, did Moslems. And so, too, did the pious Christian iconoclasts of the 8th Century, who whitewashed or defaced the vast majority of icons made before that time.

The arguments were bitter. That God had become flesh, the iconophiles insisted, made holy portraiture permissible. “If the Son of God became man and appeared in man’s nature, why should his image not be made?” asked John of Damascus. “Man himself is created after the image and likeness of God; therefore there is something divine in the art of making images,” argued Theodore of Studios. That the iconoclasts relented in 835 is of immense importance to the history of European art.

The result of that decision, at least in the East, was something of a compromise. Statues remained suspect--they recalled pagan idols--but abstracted, dematerialized, portraits were accepted as pleasing to the Lord. All extraneous details (say, still lifes in the foreground) were to be omitted. The fluid, lifelike movements of classical Greek statues were to be subdued in favor of stiff poses of solemnity and timelessness.

The halos of the blessed, the lines of gold that decorate the robes of Jesus (in an icon made by Angelos in the 15th Century), and the rays of gold that lend light to all these images combine (as do the light-reflecting tessera of Byzantine mosaics) to stress the insubstantial presences of the sacred souls portrayed.

The straight-nosed, longhaired, stern-eyed, bearded face of Jesus that appears in “Christ the Wisdom of God,” a late 14th-Century icon from Athens’ Byzantine Museum, is echoed by a score of icons in this show. The roundness of the halo, and that of his brow, and the curlings of his beard, set up radiating rhythms that lead the mind to God. The gold ground swims with light.

There is something Eastern in this image. Like so many others in this splendid show, it is built upon a sea of ceaseless repetitions. It is many things at once, a likeness of the Savior, a door into the mystical, a mantra for the eye.

After Constantinople fell to the armies of the Turks in 1453, the manufacture of such images gradually moved north and west, to Russia and the Slavic lands and especially to Crete.

Painters ground them out. In one surviving document of 1499, Antonio Tajapiera and his apprentices promise to produce, in a period of two months, 350 pictures of the Virgin, seven every day.

One such Cretan icon painter was Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614). A number of his early icons--some of them, including a panel depicting St. Luke portraying the Virgin, are signed--are included in this show. Later his style changed. In Spain he would produce pictures unlike any ever seen before. We know him as El Greco. His last paintings, like his first, were meditative objects. His “Stigmatization of St. Francis,” with which the exhibition ends, suggests the major debt, infrequently acknowledged, that the painters of the West owe the icons of the East.

“Holy Image, Holy Space: Icons and Frescoes From Greece” was jointly organized by the Greek Ministry of Culture, the Byzantine Museum of Athens, the Walters, and Ann Van Devanter Townsend’s Trust for Museum Exhibitions of Washington. It will tour the country for two years after closing on Oct. 16 at the Walters, 600 N. Charles St., Baltimore.