ABSTRACT
When Christianity's holy beings make their appearance in art, they do not come alone. They bring along sustaining worlds: realities in which their existence, actions, and efficacy take shape and make sense, and horizons of meaning that arise there. A new iconographic type depicting the Resurrection featured Christ liberating Adam from death like another Herakles dragging Cerberus out of Hades. Tradition, which in the Greek word paradosis, suggests gratuity and receptivity, acquires an ontological dimension in perichoresis. An iconographic type that belongs to tradition in this sense descends into the past and begins anew every time someone paints it. Litanies of images pass through it, reveal its antiquity, reconstitute it in a present time, and disappear in its space and beyond it, where its yet unseen possibilities lie.
