Icons aren’t trying to show you what someone looked like on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. They’re showing you what that person looks like now, transfigured in the light of God’s Kingdom.
That’s the short answer. The longer one gets at why Orthodox Christians have spent centuries perfecting a style that looks nothing like the Renaissance paintings you studied in school or the photographs hanging in your living room. It comes down to this: icons depict heavenly reality, not earthly reality. They’re windows into the age to come, not snapshots of the age that is.
When you stand in front of an icon of Christ or the Theotokos, you’re not looking at a historical portrait. You’re looking at a person who has been united with God, glorified, deified. The gold background isn’t trying to represent the sky in Palestine. It’s showing you the uncreated light of God’s presence, the same light that blazed from Christ on Mount Tabor when His disciples saw Him transfigured. That light doesn’t come from any sun we know.
The figures in icons are elongated, almost weightless. Their faces are serene, their eyes large and knowing, their mouths small and silent. These aren’t quirks of bad draftsmanship. Every choice is theological. The large eyes show spiritual vision, the ability to see what we can’t yet see. The small mouths suggest inner silence, the hesychasm that comes from prayer. The elongated bodies show freedom from the heaviness of fallen flesh. These saints aren’t bound by gravity anymore.
And then there’s the perspective, which works backwards from what you learned in art class. In Western painting since the Renaissance, everything converges on a vanishing point in the distance. Your eye gets pulled deeper into the picture, away from where you’re standing. Icons do the opposite. The perspective opens outward, toward you. It’s called reverse perspective, and it does something strange. Instead of you looking at a scene that’s happening somewhere else, the icon invites you into itself. The heavenly reality comes toward you. You’re not a spectator. You’re a participant.
This matters because of the Incarnation. When the eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the invisible God became visible. That’s what makes icons possible in the first place. We can paint Christ because He took on a human body, a real face, real hands. The Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 settled this question after decades of iconoclasm, when some Christians thought depicting Christ was blasphemous. The Council said no: if you deny we can paint Christ, you’re denying He really became human. The honor we show an icon passes through to the person depicted. We’re not worshipping paint and wood. We’re venerating Christ, His Mother, the saints who are alive in Him.
But here’s the thing. If icons just showed us what Christ looked like during His earthly ministry, they’d be missing the point. We don’t worship a dead teacher from two thousand years ago. We worship the risen Lord who sits at the right hand of the Father, who will come again in glory. Icons show us that glory now. They show us what we’re becoming, if we let God’s grace transform us. That’s theosis, the whole point of salvation: that we might become by grace what Christ is by nature.
So the stylization isn’t primitive or unskilled. It’s intentional, disciplined, handed down through generations of iconographers who understood that spiritual truth requires a spiritual language. You can’t paint the Kingdom of God the way you’d paint a bowl of fruit. The rules are different there. Light doesn’t work the same way. Bodies don’t work the same way. Everything is transfigured.
I know this can be jarring if you grew up with felt-board Bible stories or paintings of Jesus that look like a nice guy from a shampoo commercial. But give it time. Spend some time in front of the icons at St. Michael’s, especially during Vespers when the candles are lit and the evening light comes through the windows. Let them teach you. They’re doing what the Gospels do in words: proclaiming that God became man so that man might become god, that heaven has touched earth and will never let go.
The icon of Christ you see isn’t showing you a man who died. It’s showing you the God-man who trampled down death by death, who sits in glory, who meets you in the Eucharist every Sunday morning. That’s not something a photograph can capture. It takes a different kind of seeing, a different kind of art. It takes an icon.
