So well expressed, thank you for explaining the link between sacred art and our Faith.
Acutis is being promoted as you rightly pointed out as the poster boy for the cool kids club. So many young people think of him as cool, a rock star. They don't know anything other than the few lines about him making a website. Perhaps he is in Heaven, but, there's nothing of heroic sanctity that is being promoted. Just some good looking rich kid.
The current vatican doesn't value Catholic saints like St. Philomena, St. Christopher but they want cool looking rich people to be handed a title of sainthood.
As your rightly said, their art conveys nothing other than a holiday photo. I've seen statues and rosary center pieces of pope Francis in Liturgical shops, in India. He's a living saint for the Liturgical shops at least.
The fan club is crazy, as long as it's not traditional it's all good.
You are so right about this weird ra-ra-ra stance of the Vatican to promote this “modern” kid. And the “art” just sours me on the whole rigamarole. It is also sickening that technology is more emphasized than holiness and sanctity. When the new Mass was suddenly forced on us in 1969, the new priest chosen to folk-sing and dance us into the new golden era of the Church was desperate to be liked and thought cool. An instant turn~off to a 14 yr-old. That tactic still repels me.
Thank you for introducing the concept of inverse perspective, which I had not known, and some of the history and development of the Eastern way of icons. I’m learning a great deal here, which would have been hard to find otherwise. Thank you again!
Wonderful post, and so well articulated. I, too find, the images presented as banal and totally lacking in an understanding of proper use of art in bringing the faithful to a deeper relationship with God. (The images of Acutis smack of something called the “uncanny valley” that happens in producing animated images of human beings. It’s easy to design cartoon or video game characters that are somewhat abstracted. When animators try to portray human beings naturalistically, something always seems “off”. The disconnect between a human-like appearance and the negative emotional response it provokes is the uncanny valley.) There are too many poorly formed artists commissioned to pump out kitsch “religious” art to satisfy the desires of equally unformed patrons. Even highly-trained naturalist artists are producing ever-larger altar pieces that do not belong in a liturgical setting. Your efforts at educating people about the proper creation and production of truly sacred art is very important. Thank you!
This is really interesting, especially the issue of the Uncanny Valley. I was trying to put my finger on why that statue and the weird bas relief icon carving gave me the creeps, visually. And it's that. I'd forgotten about the Uncanny valley thing.
Literal/realistic depictions may miss the target, landing on the person instead of Christ, in my opinion. I am taught to try to dispel any imagery from my mind in prayer - even if surrounded by Orthodox icons.
Icons are useful because they are not realistic. They do not ask me to see the person, but the image of God. They do not teach me “science”, but Truth. They do not fix a time or place, but allow time and space to dissipate. Perhaps @theuncreatedlight may have an opinion.
While Blessed Carlo is in my mind, in his writings and actions heroic, the common art depicting him (as in the two images you presented) are not worthy or even able to be venerated.
We have commissioned an ikon of him by a respected ikonographer, who knows the “canons” of ikonography and will not depict him as a portrait or as a secular figure.
Hilary, it would be wonderful to wrap this up toward your original point. I am not at all sure how Carlos statue and image are any different in the Western church than any other statue of a nun, monk, or even Mary or Jesus. Those statues tend to realism with the spark of the spiritual: the sacred heart, or the objects they carry or are at their feet. They are objects of adoration and conduits just like icons are.
What is wrong with Carlos’ picture is that the computer looks more important than either the cup or the saint. Instead of being, for example imprinted on his shirt or a tablet in his hand (don’t know if he used a tablet in life). This is to your point of the Vatican wanting to look cool.
Not knowing much of Carlos’s story, I’m guessing he is known for watching an adoration through the internet? When you are shut in, ill, or in lockdown, is the screen not literally just that? A screen through which you can glimpse divinity? (through a glass darkly perhaps). The Presence is still there, you are just separated from it by the screen. You could adore it from your monk’s cell as well as you could in the chapel in front of the monstrance (and some nuns still had a screen between them and the Eucharist.)
All this then to say, that when Eucharist was offered through a zoom during lockdown, the fact that none of the words expressed that we were not actually in the room made me feel the paucity of the act. On the other hand, I have received spiritual direction and sat in deeply moving virtual services where the Spirit was undoubtedly present. Perhaps the Spirit was present in that Zoom too, only I was too traumatized to recognize it. Or perhaps our hunger for connection during lockdown made us long for that more?
No, I'm sorry. The computer screen isn't a screen like the one on your porch door. it's not something you look through. It's something you look AT. It's showing you a simulacrum of reality, not reality itself. You aren't seeing anything "through" the screen; you're seeing things ON the screen. But you have demonstrated the issue I was talking about; how screen culture, the mediation of reality through the internet has distorted our conceptual faculties so that we can no longer tell the difference. It's very disturbing.
I think we can agree it is much better to be present. But it is interesting that God is omnipresent and yet cannot be present through pixels or 0s and 1s. I guess it is only human to decide what is sacred and what is not.
There's been some very interesting psychological research on the effects of phones and the internet; it takes us away from reality. it's a retreat from the Real, not a confrontation with it. Which is the opposite of what a human needs to encounter the living God.
By this logic we wouldn't need or have the Eucharist. If God, specifically as the second person of the Trinity, is simply omnipresent and already in all the grains of sand, drops of water, big macs we eat or in this case the pixels on the screen, we would have no need for the Eucharist. Christ chose a very specific, real, and tangible way to stay with us physically after his Ascension. If he was omnipresent in all material things we could simply worship or Rather worship God through any object we want. So it's not that He can't be present in the 1s and 0s, but rather that He chose instead to take the form of bread and wine as His way of being physically present here on Earth.
In fact, the idea that "God is in everything" - so beloved of our hippie parents - is a specific and named heresy: "Pantheism". And it leads to precisely the idolatry the Iconoclasts feared. We don't worship "God-in-nature". We worship the Creator of nature.
By that logic (which was not mine) we thus wouldn’t need any representation of the divine in art, at all, because the sacrament should be enough. Now who is sounding iconoclastic?
Really great article. Aside from the immediate issues addressed, this piece is an excellent summary and introduction for people to understand the fundamental conceptual basis for iconography and iconographic veneration.
Hilary: Do you have any thoughts or views on what I guess might be called the modern Russian style of icons and church murals? I recently visited St. Nicholas Cathedral in NYC, and I was struck by the more modern and realistic style of much of the wall murals and some paintings in the iconostasis. It may have been limited to walls and the surface of the iconostasis, as opposed to framed standalone icons, which were more traditional, but the point is that the style was certainly different and not traditionally Byzantine. I would describe it as more "Roman Catholic", with an almost "kitschy" vibe to it: a palette more pastel and soft, rather than earthy and saturated. Definitely more naturalistic than traditional Byzantine iconography. I won't give any links in order to avoid having my comment be spammed, but if you do an image search for "St. Nicholas Cathedral Russian NYC" or something like that, you will see what I am talking about.
I know little about the Russian Academic style, except that iconographers - particularly Greeks - tend not to like it on principle because of it’s naturalism and aesthetically bcs its 19th century aesthetics are just mawkish. I tend to agree on both counts.
Daniel, this was (as far as one might use the term) "trendy" in the Orthodox world from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. The Russian church, under pressure from the Tsars, was made to modernize and look and act more like its Catholic and Protestant counterparts, and this meant a general denigration of traditional iconography (the Old Believers, though schismatic, preserved the older icon styles as a living tradition during this time, thankfully). Even works we recognize as wonderful today, such as those by Rublev and Theophanes, were destroyed or relegated to barns (a Rublev iconostasis was actually found in a cow barn in the early 20th century). This modernism then percolated through to the Greeks to the south, who were at the nadir of their influence in the Orthodox world. Only in the early 20th century, just before the Bolshevik revolution, were the old ways "rediscovered", and it took decades for the Russian diaspora to re-learn and spread them back into the Orthodox world (ironically, the Soviets preserved much in museums too).
The icons of those 2-3ish centuries are today often denigrated as "the Italian style" and not much loved in the Orthodox world today. But you can find churches built well into the 1950s who still bear that style (even if the priests today wish to remove them).
Oh definitely, and nobody can quite do pastel-maudlin like the Victorians. But "in the Italian Style" is the derogative term used within Orthodox circles for that entire range of styles - see also Leonid Ouspensky (The Theology of the Icon, The Meaning of Icons), Vladimir Lossky, and others. Some Russian "icons" under the early Romanovs were quite bad, and scandalous, with the painters using live models (who were sometimes mistresses). They also did some outright iconographic heresies, like depicting God the Father.
Carlo Acutis taught himself computer code (I believe from library books)so he could build a website that documented all of the known Eucharistic miracles. He believed that if more people knew about them, they would be converted.
I don't think that's bad, but you're absolutely right that the art depicting him is. The statue of him with his hands on his hips is particularly jarring and irreverent.
Why shouldn't the Vatican promote and be happy about canonizing a modern saint who lived in our times? Especially a teenager, raised only in a nominally Catholic family? His story connects with many teens and young adults of my acquaintance. Carlo Acutis lived a genuinely, faithfully Catholic life in spite of cultural and family differences, and while battling a fatal disease - all with good cheer and faith, much like Pier Giorgio Frassati. I do not see anything from the Church that emphasizes the technology Carlo Acutis used, only that he used it to promote and inform others of our Faith - which, in fact, is a spiritual work of mercy.
As for the artistic perspective, I must say, I do not find it any different from the art used to capture the images of other saints. They, too, are featured with what they are known for - what they used to bring others to Jesus, such as St. Francis of Assisi with his stigmata, St. John Bosco with the impoverished children he protected, and St. Maximilian Kolbe in concentration camp prisoner garb.
I do not think any Catholic "worships" images. We reverence them, yes - Catholics of all Rites. But any Catholic with the most basic of catechism realizes these are only images - and that the subjects of these images are examples to us of holiness.
I confess I know very little about Carlo Acutis, and such articles as I have read in anticipation of his Canonization have been quite unhelpful. This has nothing whatever to do with an age gap (there is certainly no obstacle to prayer and admiration toward Maria Goretti and similar young saints). But there is an odd quality to treatment of Carlo Acutis as if he is only “for the kids” — if that were true he could not possibly be worthy of sainthood. Those who pass along that attitude no doubt do him a disservice by reducing him to a pop culture “icon” without so much as showing him the respect of showing him as an ACTUAL icon. The images you have shown are on a par with cheap advertising — and nothing puts that attitude more on display than referring to him as “God’s Influencer”. SERIOUSLY??? I thought I was going to be sick when I saw that.
There is plenty of inferior plaster imagery if many of our greatest saints, put forward in churches which acquired the best figures they could with their limited means. Most of them are pale and overly sweet, their identities hinted at by clothes and props while their faces lack individual character. But they are displayed with love and respect, and given elevated stature. The tanned and brawny images of Carlo Acutis gloss over the fact that he lived and died with a terrible disease, and his life’s work was carried out with love born of suffering. I look forward to learning more about him — and I suspect that an accurate portrayal will suggest something quite different than a chubby goofball.
But pop culture icon is the only model we have in the Church since the hierarchy has all but abandoned the Faith, its culture and history. They NEED to produce a pop culture icon because they're in direct competition with the World on its own turf, having abandoned the green fields of its own.
As an aspiring Catholic, the bureaucratic streak which you describe here has been the greatest (exterior) obstacle to my ability to love the Church fully. Though I was not aware of the specific example you mention here.
The bureaucracy may have served to sustain the church through a long period of time, but it can also grind up the subtler experiences of the faithful.
It seems to me that it takes a special kind of ignorance to conflate a saint with the image of a saint. I know of no Catholic who makes such a mistake, but I know plenty of non-catholics who throw the accusation around.
Nothing. Just like St Francis of Assisi, St Joseph and numerous other saints, he is pictured as he appeared during life… ancient clothing does not make a saint any more or less holy.
Well done. Icons point to sacred reality, not to earthly things - the true and eternal forms.
There are some other symbols in the Nativity icon (one of my favorites):
1. The Ox and the Ass - this is the adoration by both the Jews (the Ox) and the Gentiles (the ass) - pointing out that Christ has come for us all.
2. The manger looks like a stone coffin, and Jesus is swaddled as though in grave wrappings - a foreshadowing of the Cross and the 3 days in the tomb.
If you really want to dig into iconic structure and language, the Pentecost icon is worth a study too.
A bit of trivia regarding statuary - the first council at Nicea generally frowned upon all statuary for the reasons you mentioned, but did make an exception for a well known bronze statue of Christ that St. Veronica (the woman with the issue of blood) had commissioned after her healing, and which still stood in the 4th century. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his travels, records the statue.
You're at the wrong blog, sir.
So well expressed, thank you for explaining the link between sacred art and our Faith.
Acutis is being promoted as you rightly pointed out as the poster boy for the cool kids club. So many young people think of him as cool, a rock star. They don't know anything other than the few lines about him making a website. Perhaps he is in Heaven, but, there's nothing of heroic sanctity that is being promoted. Just some good looking rich kid.
The current vatican doesn't value Catholic saints like St. Philomena, St. Christopher but they want cool looking rich people to be handed a title of sainthood.
As your rightly said, their art conveys nothing other than a holiday photo. I've seen statues and rosary center pieces of pope Francis in Liturgical shops, in India. He's a living saint for the Liturgical shops at least.
The fan club is crazy, as long as it's not traditional it's all good.
You are so right about this weird ra-ra-ra stance of the Vatican to promote this “modern” kid. And the “art” just sours me on the whole rigamarole. It is also sickening that technology is more emphasized than holiness and sanctity. When the new Mass was suddenly forced on us in 1969, the new priest chosen to folk-sing and dance us into the new golden era of the Church was desperate to be liked and thought cool. An instant turn~off to a 14 yr-old. That tactic still repels me.
Thank you for introducing the concept of inverse perspective, which I had not known, and some of the history and development of the Eastern way of icons. I’m learning a great deal here, which would have been hard to find otherwise. Thank you again!
Wonderful post, and so well articulated. I, too find, the images presented as banal and totally lacking in an understanding of proper use of art in bringing the faithful to a deeper relationship with God. (The images of Acutis smack of something called the “uncanny valley” that happens in producing animated images of human beings. It’s easy to design cartoon or video game characters that are somewhat abstracted. When animators try to portray human beings naturalistically, something always seems “off”. The disconnect between a human-like appearance and the negative emotional response it provokes is the uncanny valley.) There are too many poorly formed artists commissioned to pump out kitsch “religious” art to satisfy the desires of equally unformed patrons. Even highly-trained naturalist artists are producing ever-larger altar pieces that do not belong in a liturgical setting. Your efforts at educating people about the proper creation and production of truly sacred art is very important. Thank you!
This is really interesting, especially the issue of the Uncanny Valley. I was trying to put my finger on why that statue and the weird bas relief icon carving gave me the creeps, visually. And it's that. I'd forgotten about the Uncanny valley thing.
I have been asking for the intercession of Bl. Carlo, with good results.
Glad to have him on the team.
Literal/realistic depictions may miss the target, landing on the person instead of Christ, in my opinion. I am taught to try to dispel any imagery from my mind in prayer - even if surrounded by Orthodox icons.
Icons are useful because they are not realistic. They do not ask me to see the person, but the image of God. They do not teach me “science”, but Truth. They do not fix a time or place, but allow time and space to dissipate. Perhaps @theuncreatedlight may have an opinion.
While Blessed Carlo is in my mind, in his writings and actions heroic, the common art depicting him (as in the two images you presented) are not worthy or even able to be venerated.
We have commissioned an ikon of him by a respected ikonographer, who knows the “canons” of ikonography and will not depict him as a portrait or as a secular figure.
I hope you'll share it when it arrives.
Hilary, it would be wonderful to wrap this up toward your original point. I am not at all sure how Carlos statue and image are any different in the Western church than any other statue of a nun, monk, or even Mary or Jesus. Those statues tend to realism with the spark of the spiritual: the sacred heart, or the objects they carry or are at their feet. They are objects of adoration and conduits just like icons are.
What is wrong with Carlos’ picture is that the computer looks more important than either the cup or the saint. Instead of being, for example imprinted on his shirt or a tablet in his hand (don’t know if he used a tablet in life). This is to your point of the Vatican wanting to look cool.
Not knowing much of Carlos’s story, I’m guessing he is known for watching an adoration through the internet? When you are shut in, ill, or in lockdown, is the screen not literally just that? A screen through which you can glimpse divinity? (through a glass darkly perhaps). The Presence is still there, you are just separated from it by the screen. You could adore it from your monk’s cell as well as you could in the chapel in front of the monstrance (and some nuns still had a screen between them and the Eucharist.)
All this then to say, that when Eucharist was offered through a zoom during lockdown, the fact that none of the words expressed that we were not actually in the room made me feel the paucity of the act. On the other hand, I have received spiritual direction and sat in deeply moving virtual services where the Spirit was undoubtedly present. Perhaps the Spirit was present in that Zoom too, only I was too traumatized to recognize it. Or perhaps our hunger for connection during lockdown made us long for that more?
No, I'm sorry. The computer screen isn't a screen like the one on your porch door. it's not something you look through. It's something you look AT. It's showing you a simulacrum of reality, not reality itself. You aren't seeing anything "through" the screen; you're seeing things ON the screen. But you have demonstrated the issue I was talking about; how screen culture, the mediation of reality through the internet has distorted our conceptual faculties so that we can no longer tell the difference. It's very disturbing.
I think we can agree it is much better to be present. But it is interesting that God is omnipresent and yet cannot be present through pixels or 0s and 1s. I guess it is only human to decide what is sacred and what is not.
There's been some very interesting psychological research on the effects of phones and the internet; it takes us away from reality. it's a retreat from the Real, not a confrontation with it. Which is the opposite of what a human needs to encounter the living God.
By this logic we wouldn't need or have the Eucharist. If God, specifically as the second person of the Trinity, is simply omnipresent and already in all the grains of sand, drops of water, big macs we eat or in this case the pixels on the screen, we would have no need for the Eucharist. Christ chose a very specific, real, and tangible way to stay with us physically after his Ascension. If he was omnipresent in all material things we could simply worship or Rather worship God through any object we want. So it's not that He can't be present in the 1s and 0s, but rather that He chose instead to take the form of bread and wine as His way of being physically present here on Earth.
In fact, the idea that "God is in everything" - so beloved of our hippie parents - is a specific and named heresy: "Pantheism". And it leads to precisely the idolatry the Iconoclasts feared. We don't worship "God-in-nature". We worship the Creator of nature.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11447b.htm
By that logic (which was not mine) we thus wouldn’t need any representation of the divine in art, at all, because the sacrament should be enough. Now who is sounding iconoclastic?
Maybe it's not a need which drives us to make icons, but a desire.
I like this thought!
I'm afraid I find this comment incoherent, Leanne. I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make.
I was responding to Andy and trying to make sense of what he was saying within the context of how we worship and praise God, and specifically Jesus.
Really great article. Aside from the immediate issues addressed, this piece is an excellent summary and introduction for people to understand the fundamental conceptual basis for iconography and iconographic veneration.
Hilary: Do you have any thoughts or views on what I guess might be called the modern Russian style of icons and church murals? I recently visited St. Nicholas Cathedral in NYC, and I was struck by the more modern and realistic style of much of the wall murals and some paintings in the iconostasis. It may have been limited to walls and the surface of the iconostasis, as opposed to framed standalone icons, which were more traditional, but the point is that the style was certainly different and not traditionally Byzantine. I would describe it as more "Roman Catholic", with an almost "kitschy" vibe to it: a palette more pastel and soft, rather than earthy and saturated. Definitely more naturalistic than traditional Byzantine iconography. I won't give any links in order to avoid having my comment be spammed, but if you do an image search for "St. Nicholas Cathedral Russian NYC" or something like that, you will see what I am talking about.
I know little about the Russian Academic style, except that iconographers - particularly Greeks - tend not to like it on principle because of it’s naturalism and aesthetically bcs its 19th century aesthetics are just mawkish. I tend to agree on both counts.
Daniel, this was (as far as one might use the term) "trendy" in the Orthodox world from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. The Russian church, under pressure from the Tsars, was made to modernize and look and act more like its Catholic and Protestant counterparts, and this meant a general denigration of traditional iconography (the Old Believers, though schismatic, preserved the older icon styles as a living tradition during this time, thankfully). Even works we recognize as wonderful today, such as those by Rublev and Theophanes, were destroyed or relegated to barns (a Rublev iconostasis was actually found in a cow barn in the early 20th century). This modernism then percolated through to the Greeks to the south, who were at the nadir of their influence in the Orthodox world. Only in the early 20th century, just before the Bolshevik revolution, were the old ways "rediscovered", and it took decades for the Russian diaspora to re-learn and spread them back into the Orthodox world (ironically, the Soviets preserved much in museums too).
The icons of those 2-3ish centuries are today often denigrated as "the Italian style" and not much loved in the Orthodox world today. But you can find churches built well into the 1950s who still bear that style (even if the priests today wish to remove them).
They look very very Victorian to me.
Oh definitely, and nobody can quite do pastel-maudlin like the Victorians. But "in the Italian Style" is the derogative term used within Orthodox circles for that entire range of styles - see also Leonid Ouspensky (The Theology of the Icon, The Meaning of Icons), Vladimir Lossky, and others. Some Russian "icons" under the early Romanovs were quite bad, and scandalous, with the painters using live models (who were sometimes mistresses). They also did some outright iconographic heresies, like depicting God the Father.
Many thanks for providing this explanation and historical background, Skip.
Carlo Acutis taught himself computer code (I believe from library books)so he could build a website that documented all of the known Eucharistic miracles. He believed that if more people knew about them, they would be converted.
I don't think that's bad, but you're absolutely right that the art depicting him is. The statue of him with his hands on his hips is particularly jarring and irreverent.
Why shouldn't the Vatican promote and be happy about canonizing a modern saint who lived in our times? Especially a teenager, raised only in a nominally Catholic family? His story connects with many teens and young adults of my acquaintance. Carlo Acutis lived a genuinely, faithfully Catholic life in spite of cultural and family differences, and while battling a fatal disease - all with good cheer and faith, much like Pier Giorgio Frassati. I do not see anything from the Church that emphasizes the technology Carlo Acutis used, only that he used it to promote and inform others of our Faith - which, in fact, is a spiritual work of mercy.
As for the artistic perspective, I must say, I do not find it any different from the art used to capture the images of other saints. They, too, are featured with what they are known for - what they used to bring others to Jesus, such as St. Francis of Assisi with his stigmata, St. John Bosco with the impoverished children he protected, and St. Maximilian Kolbe in concentration camp prisoner garb.
I do not think any Catholic "worships" images. We reverence them, yes - Catholics of all Rites. But any Catholic with the most basic of catechism realizes these are only images - and that the subjects of these images are examples to us of holiness.
you might want to go back and read the article again, since you seem to have entirely missed both the point and all the content.
I confess I know very little about Carlo Acutis, and such articles as I have read in anticipation of his Canonization have been quite unhelpful. This has nothing whatever to do with an age gap (there is certainly no obstacle to prayer and admiration toward Maria Goretti and similar young saints). But there is an odd quality to treatment of Carlo Acutis as if he is only “for the kids” — if that were true he could not possibly be worthy of sainthood. Those who pass along that attitude no doubt do him a disservice by reducing him to a pop culture “icon” without so much as showing him the respect of showing him as an ACTUAL icon. The images you have shown are on a par with cheap advertising — and nothing puts that attitude more on display than referring to him as “God’s Influencer”. SERIOUSLY??? I thought I was going to be sick when I saw that.
There is plenty of inferior plaster imagery if many of our greatest saints, put forward in churches which acquired the best figures they could with their limited means. Most of them are pale and overly sweet, their identities hinted at by clothes and props while their faces lack individual character. But they are displayed with love and respect, and given elevated stature. The tanned and brawny images of Carlo Acutis gloss over the fact that he lived and died with a terrible disease, and his life’s work was carried out with love born of suffering. I look forward to learning more about him — and I suspect that an accurate portrayal will suggest something quite different than a chubby goofball.
But pop culture icon is the only model we have in the Church since the hierarchy has all but abandoned the Faith, its culture and history. They NEED to produce a pop culture icon because they're in direct competition with the World on its own turf, having abandoned the green fields of its own.
As an aspiring Catholic, the bureaucratic streak which you describe here has been the greatest (exterior) obstacle to my ability to love the Church fully. Though I was not aware of the specific example you mention here.
The bureaucracy may have served to sustain the church through a long period of time, but it can also grind up the subtler experiences of the faithful.
We've been circling the wagons since Trent. It hasn't done Catholic culture any good.
It seems to me that it takes a special kind of ignorance to conflate a saint with the image of a saint. I know of no Catholic who makes such a mistake, but I know plenty of non-catholics who throw the accusation around.
Nothing. Just like St Francis of Assisi, St Joseph and numerous other saints, he is pictured as he appeared during life… ancient clothing does not make a saint any more or less holy.
Did you read the article and just ignore it all? or just not bother with the reading part?
Well done. Icons point to sacred reality, not to earthly things - the true and eternal forms.
There are some other symbols in the Nativity icon (one of my favorites):
1. The Ox and the Ass - this is the adoration by both the Jews (the Ox) and the Gentiles (the ass) - pointing out that Christ has come for us all.
2. The manger looks like a stone coffin, and Jesus is swaddled as though in grave wrappings - a foreshadowing of the Cross and the 3 days in the tomb.
If you really want to dig into iconic structure and language, the Pentecost icon is worth a study too.
A bit of trivia regarding statuary - the first council at Nicea generally frowned upon all statuary for the reasons you mentioned, but did make an exception for a well known bronze statue of Christ that St. Veronica (the woman with the issue of blood) had commissioned after her healing, and which still stood in the 4th century. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his travels, records the statue.
Yes, I did a whole post at Christmas on the meaning of the creche and its connection to the icon of the Nativity.
https://hilarywhite.substack.com/p/what-does-your-nativity-scene-mean
Thanks, I don't think I was subscribed then.