I’m enjoying immensely reading Aiden Hart’s book about ikon painting. It has been a real eye-opener in several respects I never anticipated. The thing that really made me sit up and take notice this afternoon was his section on perspective. I had never noticed before the fact that in ikon painting it is possible to encounter a variety of novel approaches to perspective, departing from the classic single-point approach based on the work of Alberti Brunelleschi, in the Renaissance. Apparently, in order to communicate a range of theological ideas, ikon painters regularly adopt devices such as reverse and multi-point perspective.
I have not had the opportunity to read David Hockney’s writing about perspective, and would be interested to do so, but I do wonder whether he is familiar with the antiquity of some of the approaches he has explored.
Another aspect of this question really grabbed my attention, and sent me off on one of my favoured hobby-horses again. I have been interested for a long time in the theory of the contrasting functions of the different hemispheres of the brain. It appears that the left hemisphere is particularly associated with activities such as rational argument and mathematics. The right brain (putting it perhaps excessively simply) has a greater role in imaginative and symbolic processes, and in creativity more generally. The Orthodox readiness to move away from “rational” perspective in ikon-painting strikes me as supporting the idea I have held for a long time, that religion is much less the field of rational argument and more that of the imagination. It is not to be treated (as critics of religion typically do) as simply “bad science” marked by indifference to evidence. Faith belongs in a completely different field of human activity, in which its expressive potential far outweighs any concern it might have with explaining the world.