Journal Article

Saintly Cinema: Modelling the Icon in the Flowers of St. Francis and Andrei Rublev

Hart, Alexander

2025

Overview

Subverting terrestrial reality, Tarkovsky adopts the aesthetic principles of the Eastern Orthodox icon, translating Pavel Florensky's concepts of reverse perspective and reverse time into analogous cinematic aesthetics - principally into sacred, dreamlike temporalities. [...]they illustrate how the most realistic of artforms, film, can express transcendence, albeit to varying degrees of success. Perhaps the most significant event to influence the history of painting in this regard was the split between the churches of Rome and Constantinople in 1054, before which the iconographic traditions of Western and Eastern Christianity were in relative harmony,2 and after which two distinct traditions arose, eventually producing the Renaissance in the West. [...]it has been suggested that the first expressions of Humanism, the prevailing philosophy of the Renaissance, were born through Francis's theology and Giotto di Bondone's art, the latter of which bears \"a secular spirit, satirical, sensual and positivistic, hostile to asceticism,\" in contrast to the austere spiritual aesthetics which had formerly characterized Christian iconography.3 During the same period in the East, by contrast, artists resisted the West's technical developments in perspective, since, for them, it was tantamount to idolatry to represent religious subjects through linear perspective-particularly the mystery of the Trinity. \"10 In this sense, Giotto focussed his art on the human being as part of the \"natural\" world: a feature of Western art that was virtually unseen since the classical period.

• Publisher: University of Nebraska at Omaha, Department of Philosophy and Religion
• Subject: Aesthetics / Artists / Christianity / Film history / Giotto di Bondone (1276-1337) / Motion pictures / Realism / Religion / Rossellini, Roberto / Tarkovsky, Andrei / Time