The Icon in Art History.
The word “icon” has been bandied about in modern life, especially popular culture, so much that the term has now drifted further from its religious and historical moorings. To the modern eye and mind, icon connotes glamour, wealth and star status rather than something devout or humble, or even pictorial.[1] Today, celebrities, film stars and pop stars are awarded the title of “icons.”[2] But if there is something akin to the definition of “icon” in its modern sense in the history of art, it is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which has a special, indefinable quality that makes it stand out and even resonate in the world of today where the mysterious lady is reproduced and replicated in a bewildering number of contexts and in different media, ranging from the solid to the digital. Despite the Mona Lisa’s separation from traditional religious art, some Leonardo scholars have sought to connect the art history “icon” with the aesthetics of the Byzantine period when icons were produced with a predominantly spiritual function in view. In an interesting essay Claire Farrago argues that despite Leonardo’s works of art not resembling Byzantine icons, the renaissance master’s work shares “an underlying, widely held assumption that human understanding of the divine is reached through the senses, above all through the most noble sense of sight.”[3] In other words supporters of Byzantine icons guarded against charges of idolatry by arguing that the image did not show the presence of the divine figure, Jesus, Mary, and they thought that the icon’s “similarity and prototype are only formal- [because] image and copy are not linked in an essential unity as are Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”[4] Later after the resolution of the Iconoclastic Controversy of 843 AD, it was decided that icons could be admitted into the liturgy.
[1] The idea of the film star may have been predicted by Charles Baudelaire in the section on women in his 1863 “Painter of Modern Life” where he describes the detached, mystical nature of some women as demonstrating what he calls “professional beauty.” The use of the word “star” in connection with a conspicuous individual in public life seems to derive from the Frankfurt School’s investigation into what they called “the culture industry.” See Theodore Adorno: “Its ideology above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs. “Culture Industry reconsidered” in New German Critique, 6, Fall 1975, 12-19 (translated by Anson G. Rabinbach).
[2] The link between “icon” in its modern sense and the pop/film star probably begins in the 1980s with the Madonna phenomenon, itself revealing as a name as it brings the mystification of the star system into view while recalling the true nature of icons in their religious sense.
[3] Claire Farrago, “Aesthetics before Art: Leonardo through the Looking Glass” in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art In and Out of History (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 45-92, 75.
[4] Ibid.
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