Icons
Windows into Heaven
In terms of the dynamic between spectator and painting, (religious) icons might be in a league of their own. For centuries the popular wisdom has been:
you don't examine the icon - the icon examines you.
We could unpack this at length, but let's say just for now that any painting has the potential to show you stuff about yourself, if only in the way you respond to it. Icons are created specifically to do this: to open a portal between this existence and an utterly different kind of existence - crudely put, between heaven and earth.
Irina Bradley is an iconographer trained in the classical style:
However, she also produces work like this:
People who know the work of Mark Rothko will detect resonances here. But the similarities are deeper than mere appearance. Rothko presented his viewers with fields of complex colours which said nothing of themselves except the very fact of their existence. People might see windows or doors, but that said more about them than the painting.
Bradley is on to something similar.
But the claim that icons are 'windows into heaven' deserves a little more attention.
It becomes problematic if we think of Heaven as a place (bounded and constrained by Time and Space), and especially if we imagine Heaven as being 'out there'. In fact, many of the traditional ways of talking about Heaven - 'being in the closer presence of God', and so on - make that traditional statement about icons absurd.
There are many more problems with those ideas of Heaven, which we can't go into here.
The claim about icons starts to make sense though when we think of Heaven as a state of being, and one which we already know (potentially) because it is part of our interior life or consciousness; something truly spiritual. Inasmuch as icons prompt us to reflect on our inner lives, they are indeed windows into Heaven: the Heaven which we find within ourselves.