At the beginning of the fifth century, the icon made its appearance in the church, initially in the martyria, the burial places of saints (memoriae) of which there were many in Egypt, Syria, near Tarsus, and elsewhere. Soon monastic communities began to supply pilgrims with mementoes, including pictures of the saints whom they honoured and representations of holy places which they had visited. Those who were devoted to a high ideal of doctrine came to Jerusalem and saw at the Holy Sepulchre the traffic in icons, little pictures, lamps, ampullae with oil from the holy places and relics and were indignant at the new idolatry, inconsolably crying out for the cleansing of the faith from superstition.[20] All this arose and developed on soil saturated with survivors of the ancient and oriental worlds. The same soil also gave birth to the Festival Icon with representations of those events of the Gospel such as the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism of Our Lord, the Transfiguration, and the like. These events were first celebrated by services first and foremost at the places where they happened. Side by side with the paintings on the church walls, icons and portable pictures also bore representations of these events, in which the typical characteristics of the place and scene were supplied and the composition itself based upon reality. The pilgrims, when they looked at a picture of the Baptism of Our Lord, were reminded of the hilly banks of the Jordan and its swirling water and even of the column crowned with a cross which stood to mark the actual spot; and so the icon made for the pilgrims showed all these details. So too icons of the Nativity of Our Lord would show the hills of Bethlehem, the cave, and the manger, or the Crucifixion would have the walls of Jerusalem in the background.[21]
20. The Cross Raised on Three Levels, Iconoclastic period, 13th century. Half-dome of the sanctuary apse, Saint Irene Basilica, Istanbul.
21. Menology from the Month of February, c. 15th century.
Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, Egypt.
Remarkable is a series of icons painted on the lid of a wooden box of the sixth century from the Lateran treasure, now in the Vatican. The box is about 8 inches (20 cm.) long, shallow, and filled with a mass of wax and plaster in which are embedded pebbles and other fragments from holy places in Palestine. Five small-scale compositions show the Ascension and the Resurrection (or rather the Women at the Sepulchre) above, the Crucifixion across the middle, and below the Nativity and the Baptism. In this order the pilgrim had visited the holy places: the church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, the church of the Resurrection, the church of Golgotha in Jerusalem, the cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem and the banks of the Jordan. Each subject is characteristic both in composition and in the types of the figures, but here we are concerned only with the material setting. The theme of the Resurrection is pictured In the form of the approach of the women to the sepulchre (Mary hastens thither first of all, in agreement with the Apocrypha current at the time). Accordingly the composition shows us the gates of the small rotunda of Our Lord’s sepulchre; this looks from outside like a low octagonal tower crowned by a conical metal roof like a bell-tent, with a cross at the top: the open doors allow us to see an altar with a cross upon it in the front room of the sepulchre, now the Chapel of the Angel. The sepulchre is a cave hewn out of the rock. The cover is protected from top to bottom by a grille or trellis. Above the pointed roof hangs (from the ceiling of Constantine’s great rotunda, the church of the Anastasis) a circular candelabrum such as used to be called rota, later corona luminis, a hoop with openings in it to take lamps. To this day the pilgrims take away from Jerusalem as mementoes icons of the Resurrection with a picture of the modern marble canopy which contains the remains of the cave; out of its doors rises Christ, flying upwards according to the Catholic representation.
The scene of the Nativity gives also an ancient recollection of the cave at Bethlehem, still open and accessible from outside to pilgrims, as it was before Constantine built his great church over it. The cave is a shallow niche hewn in the rock, above it is the star, within is the manger with the Child, at the entrance on the left Mary lies on a mattress, on the right Joseph sits sleepily. Jesus at his Baptism is figured as a child standing in the water up to his neck. John puts his hand upon him, two disciples stand behind, on the right are two Angels offering towels and above the hand of God sending down the Dove. This is a very ancient composition, as are those of the Ascension and of the Crucifixion, with the two thieves (youthful) and the figure of Christ clothed in the purple robe. This type goes back to the fourth or fifth century. Other surviving icons point to the Syro-Egyptian origins of this kind of painting. First we must mention the well-known tradition of the Vernicle, the napkin at Edessa upon which the face of Christ was imprinted. We have copies of this under the names of the Holy Mandylion,[22] ‘the image not made with hands’, and ‘the holy napkin’, in wall-paintings from the eleventh or twelfth centuries, and devotional icons of this type are very common in Russia from the fourteenth century. This tradition was clearly founded upon the Egyptian portraits painted upon mummy cloths. It is well known that the Byzantine icon that rose to prominence in the fifth to sixth centuries was afterwards brought to a sudden stop by the growth in the eighth century of the iconoclastic movement, which systematically exterminated every production of the Byzantine craft to the extent that we can do no more than guess about it and search out traces of the ancient Greco-Oriental originals in the productions of late times. We have no single example of Byzantine icon-painting older than the ninth century. Of course, for the purpose of the history of the Russian icon we need not go beyond those later Byzantine examples, Russians would see and copy no icons till the tenth and eleventh centuries, but we must not shut our eyes to the changes due to the iconoclastic persecutions. We have, for instance, during the time of the iconoclasts the curious legend of the ‘icon-toys’ of the Empress Theodora. To judge by the account of their sizes these were little panels four or six inches long, which could be used by the icon worshippers in secret, so as not to draw upon themselves the persecutions of the iconoclasts. As if on purpose, fate has preserved for us one of these toys, an icon with the head and bust of S. Stephen, the first martyr.[23] It is of the seventh or eighth century, but was half destroyed in ancient times so that of the original painting only the head of the saint remains. In the tenth or eleventh century, after the veneration of icons had been restored, the shoulders were supplied in a different style and made too large in proportion to the small, neat head of the ancient type. There are many other Greek icons of about the same small dimensions as this, but they are all of later date. So, miniature Greek triptychs were made for use on journeys or for distribution to pilgrims. Hence, it appears that though the iconoclasts caused others to hide their icons away in their houses for a season, the result was a contribution to the development of the devotional icon.
Iconoclasm was a reaction against the spread of the veneration of icons painted upon wood because these, far more than wall-paintings, put representations of God and the saints into people’s hands and made them common objects. The arguments for this ideological position might then have been expected to give us a full account of the development of the painting of icons upon wood. But there is nothing of the kind. They merely tell us of exaggerated cases of icon worship: they called their opponents wood worshippers. The icons had become the objects of superstitious rites; the people were adorning them with decorations and with jewels; they were publicly censed in the churches; they were used for the healing of the sick; the sick were led to sleep in their presence and dream under their inspiration, a survival of the pagan incubatio. Special icons came into use to celebrate birthdays, weddings, funerals, to give form to vows and to the memory of the dead. If a well dried up, an icon was cast into it; cloth was sanctified by being spread upon an icon, they were given to the godparents at a christening; paint was scraped off an icon and mixed with bread for the Communion; the bread was laid upon an icon and used for the Communion.
But besides these accounts of the extremes to which the venerators of icons went, we get nothing from either the attack or defence, save
See the controversy between S. Jerome and the Gaulish pilgrim Vigilantius who vainly tried to protest against the veneration of relics and icons, all-night watchings in
Kondakov,
Latin
Russian Museum, No. 1810, from the collection of N. P. Likhachëv.
