From Portrait to Icon: Traditions and Innovations of Antique Portraiture in Early Christian Images of Saints
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18688/Keywords:
Early Christian painting, depictions of saints, genesis of the icon, Late Antique portraitureAbstract
This article is part of the research project “Tradition of Portraiture in Late Antique and Early Christian Art of the 3th–7th centuries” at the State Institute for Art Studies.
In Byzantine art studies, there is a large debate on genesis of the icon as a devotional object that exhibits portrait-like characteristics. The course of its development was allegedly the process of losing individual features of the portrait and gaining abstract characteristics of the devotional object. The paper aims to bring up the issues of temporal development of the theory of icon and the nature of prerequisites and prototypes of this phenomenon anew in order to reconsider the relationship between “portrait features” and “icon features” of an image and to trace their dependence on its sacred or profane designation. The depiction of saints in the Early Christian monumental painting has been chosen as the main subject of the current study, as they have been often omitted in the works on genesis of icon.
A large part of the paper is historiographic in its nature. Here one can find observations of the scholars on the initial phase of the icon’s existence, the summarized data on its alleged sources. The main goal of this section is to reveal semantic similarities between the figure of a saint and characters of the antique and late antique portraiture. Apart from the traditional comparison to the imperial representations, the study focuses on the depictions of philosophers, deceased, and the portraits of dignitaries in honorific sculpture. The other aspect discussed in the paper is the formal correspondence between the images of saints and other types of late antique portraiture. The purpose of this part is to disclose concurrency in the development of the two phenomena.
The survey allowed to conclude that the “individual” and “abstract” features in the depiction of a person were not firmly associated with the cult or profane context from the beginning. The interrelation that secured the correspondence between the generalized language of the image and its sacred connotation, was forming together with the development of the Early Christian art. The evolution of style, as it is shown, was among the influences that determined the concept of sanctity.
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