The icon: technique, canon and the Ukrainian variant

Icon painting is a technical craft with a fixed procedure, and understanding the procedure explains a good deal about why icons look as they do.

The method

A seasoned wooden panel, sized and covered with layers of gesso, sanded smooth. The drawing incised. Gold leaf laid on a bole ground and burnished. Then paint: pigment ground in egg yolk, applied in translucent layers from dark to light, building the form upward rather than modelling it with shadow.

Faces are painted last and by the most experienced hand. The sequence is fixed, and it is fixed because it works.

The canon

Subjects, poses, colours and inscriptions follow established types. This is deliberate: an icon is not intended as an original composition, and a painter working within the canon is doing something closer to a musician performing a score than to an artist inventing.

Where the Ukrainian schools depart

From the seventeenth century, baroque influence enters: fuller modelling, more naturalistic faces, elaborate carved and gilded frames, and a great deal more ornament.

Local faces appear. Donors appear. The result is recognisably a Ukrainian variant and it was controversial at the time.

The folk icon

Painted on glass in the Carpathian regions — reverse painting, so the work is done in the opposite order and cannot be corrected — and by village painters on wood elsewhere. Bright, flat, direct and made for households rather than churches.

These are the ones I find most affecting, and they were long dismissed as crude by people comparing them with work made for cathedrals.

A method of making that has barely changed in eight hundred years is, to my eye, a standards document: material, sequence and tolerance all defined. I am not the person to assess where the schools depart from the canon. But a procedure staying fixed that long shows that what preserved it was not writing but repetition passing from master to apprentice.