https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UFli_UDw48g
Right, now next question. Do you see in a distinction between painted icons, relief icons, and statues? And what do you think are the benefits or limits of each? Yeah. Well, I think for sure the fullest version of the icon is the color, is the painted icon. Not in the sense that one is better than the other, but in the sense that in a painted icon, you can have more meaning. There’s more meaning that happens in a painted icon because then the color is part of the actual manifestation and color has some importance. It’s not as typified as some people think, but it definitely does have a function. The use of light and use of transparency, all of this type of use. And so I think that that’s one of the reasons why painted icons became the central art of the church. And so I see it as a hierarchy. And so I believe that painted icons were really the central art of the tradition. And then carved icons would be more peripheral and would be used in places on objects that would require use on gospel covers, on crosses, crucifixes, all this type of stuff that would be carried around, processed. And then statuary never really developed for sure in the tradition. And it’s been looked down upon in many places. But I honestly don’t have a problem with statuary. I make statues for Catholic patrons. If an Orthodox patron asked me to make a statue, I would wonder why. I’d kind of ask and try to figure out, are you trying to provoke, what are you doing? Because I don’t believe also in provoking tradition just to provoke it. It just developed that way in the East where statuary wasn’t part of the tradition. And it was refused by several, there are some important saints that have spoken against statuary because their argument is, I think it was St. Theodore, who was it? Who said that? I forget the saint, that’s horrible. There’s a late saint who put together the Philokalia, not the Philokalia, but the canons of the councils. And he said, sorry? Nicodemus Agriorite. Yes, I think that’s what it is, yes. He said that statues cannot be used in the church because they’re not images of something else, but they’re the thing itself. And that was his argument. And so I don’t know, that’s the argument. All right, interesting. And Aidan wrote about that on the Orthodox Art Journal. We do have a few articles on statuary and icons in the tradition. Yeah, I remember actually in some of the very early writings there are mentions of statutes and some miracle working ones right back in the sort of, you see this, you can see in there. So it’s certainly something you can’t push out altogether. No, there are statues in the Orthodox Church. Like people who say there aren’t, they’re wrong. There are statues. There are statues in Greece. There’s a miracle working statue of St. George in the Mediterranean. There are, in Russia, they have statutes. There are certain saints that are represented only as statues, St. Neil Stolbensky is represented only as a statue. And so there are marginal versions of it, but we also, we have to just understand it’s a hierarchy. People who would want to use these exceptions as saying, well, it’s okay, so we’re gonna fill our church with statues is you’re not doing things with the right reasons. Like what is your reason? What do you want to accomplish? But also just saying that it’s not Orthodox and it doesn’t exist, well, it’s not true. It exists on the fringes, it exists on the margins. It’s exceptions, there are places and they’re a miracle working one, so, you know. Peace. [“Pomp and Circumstance”]