SKU: Anal_Vol16_2022
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Articles:
St. Gregory Palamas's adversaries, rather astonishingly, accused him of being against icons and even of having desecrated one. Iconoclasm is not the first accusation associated with the controversy over Palamism, and yet, St. Gregory and his followers were accused of being anti-icon. Was such an attack just a manifestation of 'all's fair in love and war,' of 'throw everything at your enemy and see what sticks' or did St. Gregory and his supporters, by their statements, opinions, and acts, lend credexce to the allegation of iconomachy? The present article deals with this question and attempts to answer it.
These paragraphs encompass a theoretical meditation on the icon from the painter’s perspective. They treat the icon as a creative act, in light of its aesthetic implications, contemporary challenges, possibilities, and ambiguities. They aim not so much to answer questions as to explore them, in the hope of elucidating facets of the icon as a work of art that perhaps might go unexplored within a more systematic and polemical approach in current theological debate.
The Holy Scripture has always been the main source of the Christian doctrine and teaching. It is the essential canon resorted to by the Church Fathers to appraise the correctness of Faith. The patristic approach to the Bible was anything but superficial; they were drawing on it rather with deep, extensive, and objective study to understand the sense of its verses.
The subject of this work is the study of a group of portable icons from the nineteenth century from the point of view of a Historian of Modern Greek Art. The paper argues that historians of art who do not approach the particular aesthetic properties of the icon as a means of giving an existential form to divinity or sanctity refuse to open a dialogue with theologians. And even though the international discourse around the history of art insists on expressing the ‘complaint’ that the reading of religious sentiment is now satisfied by the prolific production of objects of veneration without any special artistic merit, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether the artistic deficiency in question is because we are overlooking the fact that the relationship between the believer/viewer and the icon is not limited to passive observation. On the contrary, it is something that derives from participation in the experience of worship as a whole. As a result, the icon will not allow us to see it in its fullness if we do not respect its integrity.
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