They include a 20-foot face head-and-body image of Jesus, the Pantokrator (ruler of all), which will look down on the congregation from above, per Orthodox tradition. He has spent the last 18 months completing similar icons he plans to affix to the dome in December. It took him a year to create and hang the works that now cover the 27-by-36-foot wall behind the altar, including 45 life-size religious figures and 30 human-size angels in three sacred scenes. So what was the other error or, perhaps, a disappointing choice of words? There is this: Bouloubassis, 49, is well into the project. In terms of getting the timeline right, it would appear that a misunderstanding of the 787 date led to the 1,200-year reference that needs to be corrected. This is complicated material, to say the least. Note the detail that Jesus himself becomes the first icon from which all other icons flow. 'Is she worshipping the picture? No, she is showing love for her child who isn't there.' 'It's like a mother looking at a picture of her son,' Bouloubassis says. If Jesus could draw human beings to God by taking on bodily form, the church father reasoned, his physical likeness and could draw people toward the heavenly. John of Damascus wrote a treatise defending the practice. The church overruled these 'iconoclasts' in 787, after St. Many inside and outside the faith believed their veneration violated the Ten Commandments' stricture against making or adoring graven images. After all, the reference to 313 is followed by this material, which includes one of many accurate uses of the word 'veneration:'. Maybe it was misunderstanding of another note in the complicated history of this subject. So if, as I said earlier, icons were part of Christian life in the first centuries, where did the 1,200 figure come from? Even if you start the timeline in 313 that would give you a different number.

They incorporated saints and other religious figures as subjects, a practice that helped educate those who could not read. Then Emperor Constantine I legalized Christianity in 313, and iconographers began developing the art.

For much of that time, Christianity was banned in the Roman Empire, its followers persecuted.

In fact, later on in this story, there is this: Bouloubassis, who was born in Baltimore but moved to Greece as a child, is heir to a tradition born in the first three centuries after the death of Jesus. Where did that reference to 1,200 years come from? After all, there are remnants of icons in the earliest Christian ruins and the hidden sanctuaries of the catacombs. If all goes as planned, Bouloubassis will leave the interior of the year-old church covered in icons - mural-sized renderings of Christ, the saints, angels and other religious images that have been part of the Orthodox Christian worship tradition for more than 1,200 years. However, the very next paragraph contains a crucial error of history. The angel, a figure from the Book of Revelation, is one of 16 that Bouloubassis, a master iconographer from Greece, plans to paint and affix to the 60-foot dome inside Saint Mary, part of a years-long project in art and worship the Hunt Valley congregation launched in 2013. By nightfall, the cherub seems alive, its eyes gazing down from heaven. He fleshes out a Bible, then two hands to hold it.

Swirling on reddish-brown pigment, he brings its wings to life. As Dionysios Bouloubassis picks up his paint brush at Saint Mary Antiochian Orthodox Church early one morning, the large canvas before him is blank but for the outlines of an angel he has sketched in pencil. This story gets so many details right that I hesitate to note an error or, maybe, two - one of mathematics (I think) and the other is, well, just a strange hole that would have been easy to fill.įirst things first: Here is the overture. Iconography is a complicated subject on several levels, both in terms of the theology, the history and the craft itself. The story ran in The Baltimore Sun, the newspaper that landed in my front yard for a decade, which means that it's about an Orthodox congregation that I have actually visited. What we have here is a beautiful little feature story about a subject that is, literally, close to the heart and soul of any Orthodox Christian - icons.

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