Work · Russian Religious Philosophy
Iconostasis
Interprets the icon as a boundary between the visible and invisible worlds and defends its “reverse perspective” against Renaissance perspective; written in 1922, published only in 1972.
Introduction
Florensky wrote “Iconostasis” in 1922, drawing on his lectures; it could not be published in the Soviet Union and appeared only in 1972 in a theological yearbook of the Moscow Patriarchate. The essay starts from the dream as a boundary between the visible and the invisible world and interprets the icon, and the iconostasis that separates the sanctuary from the nave, as such a boundary: not a picture of the holy but a window through which it appears. Florensky contrasts the icon with Renaissance painting and its linear perspective, which in his view expresses a subjectivist, secular worldview, and defends the “reverse perspective” of the icon as true to another kind of space. The essay has been influential in theology, art history and theories of the image; its verdict on the Renaissance has also been criticised as polemical.
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