ABSTRACT
The human body has been the primary subject of Orthodox icons from Byzantium to the present. Yet, surprisingly, Orthodox interpretations of the body in icons have been remarkably dissonant. Byzantine icon theory repeatedly emphasized the incarnational basis and lifelike appearance of holy figures in icons. But in the twentieth century, Orthodox writers such as Evgeny Trubetskoy (1863–1920), Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), and Leonid Ouspensky (1902–1987) employed the uniquely modern association of abstraction with spirituality to reinterpret the holy bodies in icons as disembodied figures in the heavenly realm. For Trubetskoy, the icons in the church program provided an eschatological vision of cosmic unity that contrasted with the violence of the First World War. Florensky drew on Russian Symbolism to describe icons as images of the spiritual world rendered through a non-naturalistic style. Ouspensky, closely associated with Neopatristic thinkers such as Vladimir Lossky, attempted to link the non-naturalistic styles of medieval Russian icons with the development and spirituality of hesychasm. The result of these developments in Orthodox icon theory in the twentieth century was the inversion of traditional Byzantine icon theory and a prevailing understanding of the holy figures in icons as disembodied.
