Mosaics are icons made from thousands of tiny pieces of colored glass, stone, or gold fitted together on walls, ceilings, and domes. They do the same work as painted icons but on a much larger scale.
Walk into an ancient Orthodox church and look up. You might see Christ Pantocrator gazing down from the dome, his face assembled from thousands of gold and glass tesserae catching the candlelight. That’s a mosaic. It’s not a painting. It’s an image built piece by piece, usually covering entire architectural surfaces rather than hanging on a stand.
The technique goes back to the early centuries of Christianity. When the Church could finally build public places of worship after Constantine, Christians covered their basilicas with mosaics. The medium was expensive and permanent, which made it perfect for the most important spaces. Hagia Sophia in Constantinople had massive mosaic programs. So did churches in Ravenna, Jerusalem, and across the Byzantine world. These weren’t decorations in our modern sense. They were theology you could see.
Why Mosaics Matter
Here’s what people from Protestant backgrounds often miss: Orthodox churches don’t separate “art” from “worship” the way we do now. A mosaic of the Theotokos in the apse isn’t there to make the building pretty. It’s there because when the priest celebrates the Eucharist at the altar below, the whole Church is present. Heaven and earth meet in the liturgy. The mosaic makes that visible.
The Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 settled this. After decades of iconoclasm, when emperors were literally chiseling mosaics off church walls, the Council affirmed that venerating images is Orthodox. The honor we show an image passes to the person it represents. This applies whether that image is painted on a wooden panel or assembled from glass cubes on a cathedral dome.
We don’t worship mosaics any more than we worship painted icons. But we venerate them. We kiss them, light candles before them, and pray in their presence because they connect us to the saints they depict. A mosaic of St. Michael the Archangel isn’t just a picture of an angel. It’s a window into his reality, his presence in the communion of saints.
What Makes Them Different
Painted icons are portable. You can carry one in procession, place it on your home altar, hold it in your hands. Mosaics are architectural. They’re part of the building itself, fixed in place. That permanence says something. These images aren’t going anywhere. They’ve been teaching the faith from these walls for centuries, and they’ll keep doing it after we’re gone.
The materials matter too. Gold tesserae don’t just look expensive. Gold in Byzantine theology represents divine light, the uncreated light of God’s presence. When those gold pieces catch the flicker of oil lamps during Vespers, the whole dome seems to glow. That’s intentional. The artists knew what they were doing.
Learning to See
If you visit an Orthodox church with mosaics (and there aren’t many in Southeast Texas, though some newer churches are incorporating them), look at the dome first. Christ is usually there, sometimes with the four evangelists below him. Then the apse behind the altar, where you’ll often find the Theotokos. The placement isn’t random. It reflects the hierarchy of heaven and the theology of the liturgy happening below.
Most of us at St. Michael have painted icons, not mosaics. That’s fine. The theology is the same. But if you ever get to visit an older Orthodox church with mosaic programs still intact, pay attention. Those tiny pieces of glass and stone have been preaching the Gospel longer than any of us have been alive. They’re doing now what they did a thousand years ago: showing us that the Incarnation was real, that the saints are alive, and that when we gather for liturgy, we’re standing in the presence of the whole Church, living and departed.
The next time you’re in church and the priest censes the icons, remember that Christians have been venerating these images since the beginning. Whether painted or assembled from tesserae, they’re windows. And what we see through them is the same reality we receive in the Eucharist: Christ himself, truly present, making us partakers of the divine nature.
