Conclusion

This book was organized around several interlocking themes and a central thesis. First, it has been proposed that “reverse perspective” is an essential characteristic of icon art. Attention was paid to the fact that the principle of “reverse perspective” has been employed with astonishing persistence over the centuries and has become an almost permanent element of the make-up of the icon. The typical and “eccentric”, for a Western viewer, appearance of Byzantine and Byzantining images is largely due to their treatment in “reverse perspective”. In other words, according to the view adopted in the present work, “reverse perspective” is important as one of the stylistic features which allows us to set apart within the overall history of art a group of images under the label of “icon art”. The criterion here is not a geographic one as, even though icons have been produced overwhelmingly in Byzantium and what Dimitrii Obolensky has called “the Byzantine Commonwealth”, ¹ we come across them outside these territories as well. While being the cult object par excellence for the Orthodox believer icons, as we saw, have been produced by and for the non-Orthodox. It is on art-historical grounds that we speak of icon art in connection to images that are predominantly, but not exclusively, associated with the Eastern Orthodox Church.