Hiero-Schemamonk Constantine Cavarnos

Hiero-Schemamonk Constantine Cavarnos / Iconography & Liturgical Arts

“Certain artists who seek to be original at any cost.”

If religious works such as those of the Renaissance painters cannot be called icons, much less can sentimental, arbitrary products of the imagination, simply because they happen to have a religious subject, and still less should one give the name of “icon” to the creations of certain artists who, seeking to be “original” at any cost and thoroughly “modern”, wantonly distort and dehumanize the forms of sacred personages.

– Fr. Constantine Cavarnos, hieroschemamonk, iconographer, author. Byzantine Iconography Theologia, 1972

Featured image: from the cover of one of the many books written by Fr. Constantine

Hiero-Schemamonk Constantine Cavarnos / Iconography & Liturgical Arts

“True iconography is opposed to the ideas that art should express the imagination or personality of the artist, or the spirit of his time.”

True iconography is opposed to the ideas that art should copy nature, or should express the imagination or personality of the artist, or the spirit of his time. Its goal is to give the most effective expression to the universal truths and values of Christian religion; to lift the contemplator to the apprehension and experience of them; to transform and sanctify him. To this end the icon painter adheres faithfully to the classical Christian tradition of sacred painting, the Byzantine, employing its consecrated archetypes and techniques, avoiding arbitrariness and improvisation, as well as all that is vague, superfluous, subjective, sensual-in general, everything which tends to keep the contemplator of art objects chained to a lower level of being. The art of authentic iconography is eminently deliberate, clear, precise, simple, objective, universal, spiritual.

– Fr. Constantine Cavarnos, hieroschemamonk, iconographer, author. Byzantine Iconography Theologia, 1972

Featured image: source

Hiero-Schemamonk Constantine Cavarnos / Iconography & Liturgical Arts

“[In the arts of the Church], everything is organically related.”

Interviewer: Did (iconographer Photios) Kontoglou ever make a distinction between the so-called “big–T Tradition and small–t tradition”? Such a view states that there are some traditions in the realm of dogma, doctrine, and spirituality that are absolutely non-negotiable, but there are smaller traditions like beards and rassa that are negotiable. You don’t have to have them, but you may have them. Did he ever make any distinctions like that?

Fr. Constantine Cavarnos, iconographer & Schemamonk: He did not make such a distinction. He believed that innumerable things organically related make Orthodoxy and give it its identity.
Everything is organically related. About the Church’s arts, for example… iconography addresses itself to our sense of sight, while music addresses itself to our sense of hearing, but both seek to express the same essence, the Orthodox Faith. Architecture has its own tradition, particularly recognizable in the dome, in the round arch, and by the surfaces that are used for the wall paintings, which other kinds of architecture, such as the Gothic, do not provide. The architecture of the Orthodox church is a very important element of the totality; in other words, all of these arts are organically interrelated, though using different media.