Iconographic heresy: an idea we need to get back

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve been well introduced to the idea that Byzantine sacred art, and those forms that followed it in organic continuity from the Romanesque to the Gothic, is a kind of visual language. Its very particular use of line, form, value, space, colour, gesture etc., constitute the vocabulary of the language used to convey very specific theological ideas.

So what happens when those forms are used for ill, instead of good, to deceive, confuse or obfuscate that truth?

How does an icon teach and confirm Christian doctrine? And more to the point, how can that visual language be misused to convey ideas opposed to doctrine? What is a heretical icon, and can we find a use for this concept in the western tradition of sacred art?

Last week Anthony Visco, in an op ed for the journal of the Institute for Sacred Architecture, brought up a point that needs some more focus in the Rupnik situation. “It should not have taken his scandalous behaviour to see how problematic his art was.” 

No, it certainly should not have, but how did that happen? How were Christians so easily duped, or more likely shamed into silence, told they couldn’t possibly understand his work? How has the modern artistic doctrine of visual indifference - a variety of moral relativism - come to dominate our thinking about sacred art?

The director of the Atelier for the Sacred Arts in Philadelphia¹ wrote in “Marko Rupnik: Modern Iconographer or Denier of the Incarnation?”:

Well before the alleged scandals became public, author Chris Moore made it clear that Rupnik’s works were not only ugly, but his repeated practice of painting a shared eye between God and man, a noticeable and prominent feature of his art, is theologically misleading. When used in Catholic art, this practice has always been reserved for representations of the three persons of the Trinity, where all three heads share the same eyes. But it has never been extended to another human.  

When the logo was unveiled, Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella², head of what was then-called the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, declared that the shared eye of Christ and Adam represented the idea that “Christ sees with the eyes of Adam, and Adam with the eyes of Christ.³” Such an implication is likely why no orthodox iconographer has ever depicted such a merging. Rupnik takes what is sublime and distorts it, following contemporary culture while ignoring the artistic traditions of the Church.

But not being in that tradition himself, Professor Visco does not press the obvious conclusion that any Byzantine iconographer would not hesitate to make: that Rupnik’s art is simply heretical. If the idea that visual art can be orthodox or heterodox is new or surprising, it can only be because we have for centuries abandoned the real purposes of Christian sacred art.

So, let’s talk about that idea and see if we can shift our perspective back a little to something more in keeping with those ancient traditions, before that great continuity was broken in the Renaissance.

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The Sacred Images Project looks at art history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of Christian sacred art.

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