Short history

The art of icons soon celebrates its two thousandth anniversary. With the background of the old Oriental, Greek and Roman art and with spiritual roots in the early Church and the teaching of the seven ecumenical councils, it has developed its specific aesthetics and painting-technology. The art-idea, its spiritual contents and developing richness of motifs, has its starting point by the beginning of the fourth century and the foundation of Byzantium.

In the great culture of the Byzantine empire and the spiritual and intellectual richness of the Eastern Church, the art of icons goes from glory to glory. A lot of schools and different styles are born, and the number of masters and artistic inventors is large. Icons as, panel-painting, mosaics, reliefs and book-illuminations are made with an artistic richness and skill, which yield this art the rank of one of the foremost picture-cultures in the history of art.

At the beginning of the eighth century, a political and theological struggle about the legitimacy of the icon within the spiritual and liturgical life, the so called iconoclasm (which literally means to destroy icons), threatened to make an end of the art. But with the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 787, the Church, helped by the famous theologian St. John of Damascus, formulated its teaching on the theology of the image. , a teaching which still is valid both in the Greek and Latin Churches. In the central texts of this council, the Church refers to the fact of the incarnation of the divine Word and that the painted images and the written Gospel mutually refer to each other and in an unerring way elucidate one another.

By the beginning of the tenth century, the icon also reaches Russian land, and the art is enriched by a long row of new styles and masters. The golden age of the Russian icon, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries with masters such as Theophanes the Greek, Andrej Rubleov and Dionisios, marks one of the peaks in the long history of the art. Among many great works of art from this time, the icon of the Old Testament Trinity made by Andrej Rubleov, probably is the most important one; an icon which with undisguised beauty and precision forms a visual Credo and a brilliant recapitulation of the fullness of the Christian faith.

In the western part of the Christian world during the Middle Ages, the catholic churches also were adorned with extensive pictorial programmes. These holy images were executed on a high spiritual and artistic level and helped man to establish a deep relationship to the Christian cosmology and anthropology. The Latin icon corresponded in an obvious way with the intention of the theology of the image, as it was established during the council of 787. Closest to the classical icon is the late-medieval Italian art, mostly known through the great painters Duccio Bouninsegna, Cimabue and Giotto.

Today the icon and the theology of the image has a new urgency, a new mission to fulfil in the light of a strongly secularised world and the new movement of ecumenism. It is in this context that I paint my icons and for this reason I open this home-page and the so called icon gallery. IMAGO is the name of my commercial activity as an icon-painter, a one-man-company with the sole ambition of surviving to the benefit of its mission.

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