Icons, earthly and ethereal

A surprising paradox is at the center of “Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons From Sinai.” The exceptional exhibition of rare Eastern Orthodox religious paintings from Egypt’s monastery of St. Catherine opens today at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Yet, in one sense, these incredible paintings should not even exist.

Here’s why. The monastery was built more than 1,400 years ago at the foot of the rough-hewn desert mountain where Moses is said to have encountered God in a burning bush and received the Ten Commandments. Over the centuries, a couple thousand paintings have accumulated within the monastery’s protective walls. (Scholars say that more than half of all known Byzantine-era icons are at St. Catherine’s.)

Yet the Second Commandment inscribed on Moses’ tablet expressly forbids the faithful from making graven images -- no likeness of any thing in heaven above, the Earth beneath or the water under the Earth, as Exodus 20:4 puts it.

Man-made pictures are forbidden. Meanwhile, an unparalleled assembly of them graces the very spot where the prohibition was declared.

The contradiction is puzzling -- but also oddly enlightening. Partly it can be explained by theological context.

The commandments are characterized by a profound simplicity. Christianity developed in a world overflowing with painted and sculpted representations of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Near Eastern gods -- and oligarchs claiming to be gods -- and the new religion meant to sweep away the dense tangle of competing doctrines.

The First Commandment nullified all those other deities: “I am the Lord your God ... you shall have no other gods before me.” The second one pulled the plug on their artistic representations.

The Getty show comprises 52 choice paintings on wood panel or manuscript vellum, most made between the 6th and the 13th centuries. Nowhere does an image of the Christian God appear, as it would later during the Renaissance.

Nor does it appear on any of the decorated liturgical objects -- a sculpted silver plate and hammered chalice for offerings of bread and wine, a priest’s linen stole meticulously embroidered with feast scenes in gold thread or a tall bronze candelabrum beautifully inscribed with saints and mythical beasts. The closest one comes to laying eyes on God is a sinuous pair of hands emerging from a star-bedecked orb, elegantly engraved into bronze at the top of a 6th century cross. They hand down a scroll to Moses.

Supernatural presence, rather than being depicted, is visually inferred through burnished gold that reflects ambient light. In Byzantine theology, gold equals condensed light. Several icons of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel informs the Virgin Mary that she will bear God’s earthly child, show the act of incarnation as an intangible line of reflected light.

The light beam is created by carefully polishing a linear path in a pattern different from the surrounding gold. It begins in the heavens, passes through a dove representing the Holy Spirit and arrives at the young woman’s womb. As candles flicker or your head moves, incarnate light shimmers in and out of view.

This use of lustrous gold is a defining innovation of Byzantine icons. Its dual character -- both earthly substance and disembodied presence -- represents the primary theological belief in Jesus’ dual nature. He is simultaneously human and divine, earthly and ethereal.

That dual nature resolves the apparent paradox. The painted saints in Byzantine icons are images spanning two worlds. The colored panel is a material object, but the image resides within a complex web of perceptual experience.

The icons’ artists, most unidentified, didn’t merely represent saints with paint. Rather, they sought to project holy figures into the space of a viewer’s consciousness.

The visual sophistication and conceptual erudition of a great Byzantine icon can astonish. Aside from the subject matter, the imaginative vision is also profoundly modern -- and not just in the sense of Andy Warhol’s famous silk-screen painting of Marilyn Monroe adrift on a golden field, which mimics the icons he saw growing up in the Eastern Orthodox Church as a child of Czech immigrants in Pittsburgh.

Rather, like a Minimalist painting by Agnes Martin and Light and Space installations by Robert Irwin or Olafur Eliasson, Byzantine art is phenomenological. Reality is manifest as something perceived within human consciousness, not independent of it.

The Getty show, deftly organized by curator Kristen M. Collins and Yale University art historian Robert S. Nelson and presented only in Los Angeles, is excellent at revealing how icons produce Orthodox Christian meaning. The installation design is a bit heavy on theatrical photo-enlargements printed on scrim. But the three sections steadily accelerate the level of complexity, which is one reason why a visitor might want to return to the start for a second, deeper look after finishing a first view.

The first room, “Holy Image,” elucidates the qualities of a Byzantine icon. Next, “Holy Space” illustrates how icons are experienced, especially in the liturgical context of an Eastern Orthodox Church. Finally, “Holy Site” elaborates on St. Catherine’s, showing relationships between the Sinai monastery and the icons’ specific imagery.

“Holy Image” opens with a bang.

At the entrance, a large painting of St. Peter in pigmented wax, one of just a handful of icons that survive from the 6th century, portrays the church pillar as a Roman patriarch. A pair of classical buildings behind him are sharply angled to create a deep perspective, thrusting the figure into the foreground. Bold, confident strokes of paint render the illusion of a carved relief.

His golden halo even casts a shadow, which falls on the buildings and painted sky behind him. The panel is brilliantly conceived as an object that is separate from the holy image. St. Peter seems to be projected in front of the wooden panel, into the viewer’s space.

This projection of a saint into our realm is powerful and disconcerting. An early 13th century panel showing St. Theodosia shows how far the format could be pushed.

She exudes the distinctive personality of a unique individual. The artist who painted Peter co-opted a Roman style at a time when a youthful church was still struggling against Imperial restrictions. Theodosia dispenses with all that. The icon feels like a portrait from life, even though the nun had long since been martyred.

Theodosia was an iconophile -- a lover of icons -- who became a legendary symbol for resistance to the destruction of painted images by iconoclasts preaching a conservative interpretation of the Second Commandment’s prohibition. (Some historians think iconoclasm was a response to the rise of Islam, since Byzantine emperors needed to usurp church authority and wealth.) A cross signifying her martyrdom is in one hand, while the other hand is raised to signal openness and receptivity.

But the open-handed gesture also signals caution. Do not destroy this icon, the raised hand warns, symbolizing defiance to false believers.

The conceptual volume gets ratcheted up in a pair of painted doors. They would separate a church nave, where the congregation stands, from the sanctuary, where the altar resides and only priests can enter. They depict the Annunciation, with Gabriel painted on the left door and Mary on the right door.

A priest on his way to the altar to perform the mystical transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ would open these doors, physically passing through the mysterious moment of incarnation. Like the dove of the Holy Spirit, he would traverse the light.

The visual ingeniousness of this art is as inescapable as its conceptual profundity. Its authority for believers is brought home in the last room, where a small, exquisite golden panel is divided on the diagonal by a wooden ladder with 30 rungs. The number corresponds to Jesus’ age when he began to preach. Monks climb life’s ladder toward heaven, while demons armed with lassos, arrows, chains and hooks strive to drag them down to the mouth of hell below.

Cheering the monks on, a throng of brethren stands at the bottom right beneath the burning bush on Mt. Sinai, while a heavenly host opposite at the top monitors the struggle. Coupled with the diagonal ladder, and given that this is an image of salvation, can it be an accident that a dramatic X forms the icon’s composition? X is the Greek letter chi, a symbol for Christ.

Perhaps the icon’s most remarkable feature is the way the demons are painted. Throughout the show, beginning with St. Peter, holy figures are projected in front of the panel to occupy a viewer’s conceptual space. That is the way the monks and angels are also painted here -- but not the devils.

Instead, the devils are flat black silhouettes. They fuse with the panel’s surface. If gold equals condensed light, these black shadows represent its deadened absence. They are what the Second Commandment warned against -- graven images, an evil to be resisted at any cost.

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christopher.knight@latimes.com

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‘Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons From Sinai’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays

Ends: March 4

Price: Free; $8 for parking

Contact: (310) 440-7300