Biblical studies
Biblical studies are not an accessory to iconography here, but its precondition. Images did not emerge in an aesthetic vacuum—they grew out of the text: its interpretation, tensions, and silences. Without attentive reading of the Bible, the icon remains merely an image; with it, the icon becomes a theological statement.
Christian iconography does not illustrate the Bible in a straightforward sense. It is not a “picture story” for the illiterate, nor a decorative commentary on sacred narratives. It is the result of a long process of reading—a reading that was communal, liturgical, and interpretative. The biblical text was read, sung, commented upon, and memorized, and only then translated into the language of images.
For this reason, biblical studies appear here not as an academic discipline, but as a tool for understanding meaning. The icon does not answer the question “what happened?” but rather “how was it understood?” Many scenes familiar from painting have no direct counterpart in the biblical narrative—they are the outcome of exegesis, patristic tradition, and at times of a single sentence read with extraordinary consistency.
This is especially evident in eschatological and symbolic scenes: depictions of Paradise, Hell, the Last Judgment, or the “Bosom of Abraham.” The biblical text is often sparse here, sometimes even laconic. The image, by contrast, is dense, filled with detail and tension. This difference does not arise from the painter’s imagination, but from an interpretative labor that, over centuries, refined the meaning of the words.
Biblical studies also make it possible to perceive what is not visible at first glance: quotations concealed in gestures, allusions encoded in the arrangement of figures, entire passages of the Gospels condensed into a single iconographic motif. In this sense, the image can be more demanding than the text—it compels recognition of a context it does not explicitly provide.
In the Byzantine tradition, the Bible was above all a book read within the community of the Church. The icon therefore does not interpret the text individually, but inscribes itself within a specific line of understanding—liturgical, dogmatic, and pastoral. This explains both the repetition of schemes and their remarkable durability. Epochs, languages, and styles changed, yet the meaning remained recognizable.
Therefore, in this project, biblical studies are not a separate thread but the foundation. Without them, it is impossible to understand why figures appear as they do, why certain scenes are present and others absent, or why an image sometimes “says more” than the text itself. It is precisely at the intersection of Scripture and image that iconography is born—not as illustration, but as an interpretation of faith.