Includes bibliographical references (pages 173-190) and index
The role of time in pictorial art -- The role of time in the visual arts : seeing a picture in the twinkling of an eye -- The doctrine of the purity of art -- The problem of pictorial time in the icon : Florensky and remembering things that happened the week after next -- The problem of time in the pictorial arts Bakhtin's chronotope -- On reverse perspective : a critical reading -- Implications of the term reverse perspective : reverse of what? -- First stage : Florensky -- Second stage : Zhegin -- Third stage : Boris Uspensky -- An alternative view : Karl Doehlemann -- Registering presence in the icon -- The cult of images and Eastern Orthodox identity -- The western position : a critical reappraisal -- Icon and relic -- Real presence in the image -- Classical antique sources -- Christian sources : Byzantine theology of the image -- A modern view : the icon as symbol in Florensky's writings -- Seeing the world with the eyes of God : an alternative explanation of reverse perspective -- A new definition of reverse perspective as a prerequisite for the present hypothesis -- The cubist background -- The theosophical background -- Classical Greek sources on divine eternity -- Christian sources on divine eternity -- Theology through liturgy -- Theology through the arts -- The present hypothesis in context -- Leibniz and the way God sees things -- Schopenhauer and art as a repetition of eternity -- Worringer's eternalization of the object
This book contributes to the re-emerging field of "theology through the arts" by proposing a way of approaching one of the most challenging theological concepts - divine timelessness - through the principle of construction of space in the icon. One of the main objectives of this book is to discuss critically the implications of "reverse perspective", which is especially characteristic of Byzantine and Byzantining art. Drawing on the work of Pavel Florensky, one of the foremost Russian religious philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century, Antonova shows that Florensky
