iconography

With the presence of Egyptian, Hindu, Buddhist, Phoenician, Zoroastrian and Greek figures, the dualism captured in phrases like Greco-Buddhist by iconographers like Albert Grunwedel and Alfred Foucher, or the reference to Gandharan art as Indo-Greek, is thus inadequate.

(15) Christian iconographers speak, not of drawing or painting, but of writing icons, understanding their work as prayer and a means through which theology becomes visible.

Thus, we are able to understand more clearly the reason why, pervaded by the image of Christ, iconographers contemplated the uncreated world in the holy icons and, touched by the One who lived inside themselves, saw with their own eyes the unutterable glory of God.

While many might think of iconographers as they think of icons, somewhat forbidding and serious, Nick's talk was filled with both a good humor--it takes ten years to become an iconographer, fifteen if you were an artist first--and lots of insight into what it is that makes icons different and fascinating.

Traditionally iconographers trace the lines of extant forms; the goal, contrary to the autonomous nature of contemporary painting, is producing a replica that eschews innovation to hand on an unadulterated spiritual precept.

Rather than drawing what the artist sees in nature (although good iconographers have mastered that skill), the iconographer studies and learns to copy as many of the best examples of iconography as possible, thereby internalizing hundreds and even thousands of images representing an unbroken tradition of more than a millennium and a half.

Some of us latterday moderns have quite comprehended the parallel between the Orthodox iconographers' reaction to 'Western' naturalistic, pre-modern painting and Western modernism.

This slippery sort of symbolism is the stuff of nightmares for iconographers, but a form of it is at the heart of many of history's most compelling images-something Borremans recognised early in life.

addresses the issue of the "copyist trend" facing contemporary iconographers. The challenge he and others face is to "identify the timeless principles and then have the courage, intelligence, and skill to express these in an authentic way, not relying on endless reproductions of old works" (57).

In the 16th century, the entire field of Russian visual demonology was transformed as iconographers introduced a much more inventive demonic bestiary and constructed complex hybrid forms, evident in scenes of the Last Judgment and the first illustrated manuscripts of the Apocalypse.

Although the 15th-century Dominican painter created significant variations on the same scene, it is said that he never retouched his paintings because, like the iconographers of Eastern Christianity he believed that he produced them under divine inspiration; thus, they should not be changed.