The Byzantine Icon of Christ Pantocrator: Form, Composition, and Technique
A wooden panel measuring seventy-one by fifty-four centimetres, made around 1580 by an anonymous Russian icon-painter, is preserved today in the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Massachusetts, and depicts Christ Pantocrator enthroned within a composition in which colour functions as a language no less significant than form. The iconographic type was not born in Russia.
It goes back to the Byzantine tradition of the sixth century, to the earliest known renderings of the almighty Lord preserved at the monastery of Saint Catherine on Sinai, and it travelled through centuries of copying and adaptation down to the Russian sixteenth century, where it found one of its most densely symbolic versions. The creator of the icon remains anonymous, something usual for the ecclesiastical painting of the period, and yet his hand preserves with rare precision all that was demanded by the technique of egg tempera, that laborious process of successive translucent layers upon wood dressed with gold leaf.
In the face is concentrated the whole tension of the composition. The hair falls symmetrically upon the shoulders, the beard is short and well-kept, and the gaze, heavy and almost motionless, does not seek out the viewer so much as it awaits him. Above the head opens a cruciform halo with the letters Ο, Ω, and Ν inscribed upon its three visible arms, a reference to the name revealed unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14), while in the two upper corners of the panel may be discerned the contracted monograms ΙΣ and ΧΣ. No detail here is a chance choice of the icon-painter; all obey a code of centuries.
The Gaze, the Gospel, and the Gesture of Blessing
Open upon His knees, Christ holds the Gospel, with the text written in red and black letters of Church Slavonic script, a choice which recalls the missionary legacy of Cyril and Methodius and the translation of the sacred texts into the language of the people. The right hand, raised in blessing with the fingers formed into the familiar liturgical type, creates together with the book a diagonal which leads the eye from below upward, from word to deed.
The severity of the expression does not negate the blessing. It tempers it, makes it heavier in meaning, as though to say that authority and tenderness do not cancel each other out but coexist in the one same person.
The Rhombus, the Mandorla, and the Language of Colour
Within an almost black oval frame, which traditionally signifies the inaccessible and incomprehensible nature of the Godhead, is inscribed an intense red rhombus. This deep red was not chosen by chance, for in the language of the icon it bears a double charge, expressing supreme authority and, at the same time, the sacrificial love that led to the Incarnation.
The rhombus and the square behind it, faintly visible at the corners through the olive-coloured surface, compose an eight-pointed star, a shape which in Orthodox theology refers to the eighth day, the one that follows the week of creation and inaugurates a new order of things.
Christ Himself, seated upon a throne that is barely traced behind the garments, wears a tunic of ochre and gold, its folds rendered through fine gold lines upon the pigment — a gold hatching technique that gives the fabric an inner radiance without the volume of the body being lost. The bare feet rest upon a footstool, low, almost invisible beneath the folds.
The Angels of the Four Corners and the Eighth Day
In the four corners of the composition, there where the square intersects the oval, may be discerned winged figures drawn with fine, almost incised lines upon the dark background. They refer to the tradition that places the four evangelists at the extremities of the composition, symbolically to carry the preaching to the four corners of the inhabited world.
The wear of time has left its mark chiefly upon the upper right portion, where the paint has come away over a large surface, revealing the wood beneath, while along the edges of the panel smaller losses of pigment may be discerned. This wear does not diminish the work; it attests to it, for it bears witness to four hundred years and more of use, transport, and safekeeping, until it came to rest in its present location.
This composition does not stand in isolation within the history of Russian icon-painting. It belongs to a period in which the great schools — Novgorod with its intense reds and bold forms, Moscow with its more serene faces and the influence of Rublev — were shaping, side by side, different versions of the same theological content. Clinton preserves today dozens of such examples, from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, allowing one to follow how an icon of Christ Pantocrator changed in style while yet keeping unaltered its dogmatic content. What the art historian studies today in this panel is not merely a religious composition but a document of how the workshop of an anonymous creator functioned, which conventions it respected, where it permitted his hand small deviations. And it is precisely at this point, between the strict repetition of a centuries-old prototype and the personal touch of a craftsman who never signed his work, that lies the value which this Byzantine icon holds for us today.
(Translated from the Greek text; translation by K. Pappas.)
