Byzantine Icons and Sacred Mosaics: The Divine Image in Gold and Glass
Christ Pantocrator — icon, Monastery of Saint Catherine, Sinai, 6th century; painted in encaustic (pigment in hot wax), this is one of the oldest surviving icons in the world and among the most studied images in art history; the deliberate asymmetry of Christ's face — one side compassionate, the other stern — encodes in a single image the full dialectic of divine mercy and divine justice In the theological imagination of the Byzantine world, an icon was not a painting. It was a window — a thinning of the membrane between the visible and the invisible, between time and eternity, between the created order and the divine reality that the created order both conceals and reveals. To stand before an icon and truly see it — not merely look at it but allow oneself to be seen by it, which is what the frontal, direct gaze of the iconic figure demands — was to participate in an act of mutual recognition across the threshold of death. The saint depicted in the icon was understood to be genuin...