icon painting at its best...

Gbex says: One of my fancies is collecting icons!..... It is not my hobby but since my girlfriend is a Fine Arts student, I have acquired the habit of collecting beautiful icons!

Let me just give you a brief background about icon painting: Actually, Christian art began, about two centuries after Christ, by borrowing motifs from Roman Imperial imagery, classical Greek and Roman religion and popular art which was the motif of Christ in Majesty that owes something to both Imperial portraits and depictions of Zeus.

In the Late Antique period, iconography was standardized, and related more closely to Biblical texts, although many gaps in the canonical Gospel narratives were plugged with matter from the apocryphal gospels.

From the 15th century, religious painting gradually freed itself from the habit of following earlier compositional models, and by the 16th century, artists were expected to find novel compositions for each subject, and direct borrowings from earlier artists are more often of the poses of individual figures than of whole compositions. Got it? Let me continue my narrative...

The Reformation soon restricted most Protestant religious painting to Biblical scenes conceived along the lines of history painting, and after some decades the Catholic Council of Trent reined in somewhat the freedom of Catholic artists.

SO there you go my friends--- icon paintings at their best!!!!!!