Icons and Sacred Art

Some Christian images are not illustrations of a story but faces meant to be prayed before. The Eastern churches call them icons and treat them as windows; the Latin West developed its own devotional images, from the Sacred Heart to Divine Mercy. This collection brings both families together in watercolor. It does not replace a painted icon blessed for a church. It borrows the grammar of those images, gold halos, frontal gazes, a Gospel book held against the chest, and sets it beside a King James verse.

From the East come three prints. Christ Pantocrator, the Ruler of All, holds the Gospel with the words “I am the way, the truth, and the life”, following a type known since the sixth-century icon kept at Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai. A second Orthodox-style Christ carries Psalm 27:1. The Holy Trinity is our homage to Andrei Rublev's fifteenth-century icon, in which three angels sit at Abraham's table, lettered with the “Holy, holy, holy” of Isaiah 6:3.

From the Western tradition come the devotions many Catholic families grew up with. Two Sacred Heart paintings, one with Jesus holding his radiant heart and one close-up of the flaming heart, go back to a French nun, Margaret Mary Alacoque, and the visions she reported at Paray-le-Monial in the 1670s. Two Divine Mercy scenes follow Saint Faustina's image: Jesus with open arms and red and pale rays, and Jesus reaching toward a kneeling man. Christ the King, crowned and enthroned in a red mantle, closes the set with Revelation 19:16. These prints belong in a prayer corner, above a home altar or in a parish office, and they are chosen as gifts for ordinations, confirmations and Orthodox name days.