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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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You mentioned icons; let's talk about actual icons. Specifically, Christian iconography.

When Christianity spreads to another culture (as it has been continuously doing since the beginning), it faces a problem: how do you represent the major figures, including Christ and the saints? You can take two different approaches here:

  1. Icons are representative, not realistic. So you can (and should) adapt iconography to the ethnic and cultural makeup of the people using them in order to make them more relatable and less foreign. Hence you have black, white, Chinese, etc. icons of Jesus, Mary, and so on.

  2. Icons are representations of real people, so they should picture them as they actually are (as best as we can tell). This entails that Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and so on look eastern-Mediterranean, since that's how they actually looked; if people want icons that look like them, well, there are plenty of saints actually from their ethnicity, or will be soon enough.

Both perspectives are defensible, but if you have perspective (1) you'd be wrong to say that people with perspective (2) are just being racist or ethnocentric.

Now, of course, neither Aragorn nor any other character in Lord of the Rings is a real person. But people frequently have perspective (2) about source material that they are attached to, and I don't think they're entirely wrong!

PS: What amounts to good iconography, especially as it relates to these two perspectives, is apparently a great way to get some scissor statements in Orthodox Christian communities. Is this picture a valid/good icon, or not? Context for those who aren't familiar: this picture is a classic Orthodox icon design, with the Theotokos (Mary) and infant Jesus (the angels are Michael on the left and Gabriel on the right). It's also got all the iconographic writing which is necessary to make something an icon: the "ΜΡ ΘΥ" (which stands for the first and last letters in the Greek for "Mother of God") above her halo, and "ΙC ΧC" (the C's are lunate sigmas; it stands for "Jesus Christ") near the Christ child, and even the "ο ων" (Greek ""He who is", referring to the name for God) on his halo. The problem? It's in a cutesy anime style. (The artist did get the colors wrong; usually Mary has a red outer garment (for holiness) and a blue inner one (for humanity). But it's possible it's imitating a non-standard icon, since those rules are not quite universal.)

(The artist did get the colors wrong; usually Mary has a red outer garment (for holiness) and a blue inner one (for humanity).

They may be copying the Catholic version of this, known as Our Lady of Perpetual Succour (or Help, in the modern version) where the inner robe is red (humanity) and the outer robe blue (heavenly). Same way the Sacred Heart images have red outer robe and white inner robe.

Though the Wikipedia article says:

The Blessed Virgin Mary — wearing a dress of dark red, in Byzantine iconography the color of the Empress.

The style is - hmmm. It's done sincerely, but in a 'cutesy' style as you say, that is not associated with 'serious' depictions. Is the artist trying to do an emotionally appealing picture? Just copying images in their preferred style to show they can? What is the intent here? I don't think it's malicious, but it may not be devotional, either.

Saucenao.com is generally a good way to find the source for art, particularly anime-style art. Using it finds the artist's Pixiv account. Though apparently unlike most Pixiv users he is not Japanese, but lives in Australia and was born in Vietnam. As you guessed, the image is titled "Our Lady of Perpetual Help". The image posted prior to the Mary one (a few months before) is of Madoka (from the excellent anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica) done in a similar iconographic style, though without as many details. Also, checking the artists DeviantArt account finds a photograph of the Madoka art framed and set up as part of a Madoka shrine. So I'm guessing he did a bit of research for the sake of doing the Madoka one, which inspired him to do the Mary one. Other content that people might find objectionable for Christian reasons includes some drawings of yuri and a drawing of incestual yuri between the sisters from Frozen. Of course, most Christians do all sorts of things that some people might find objectionable for Christian reasons, so this doesn't mean much. And indeed, checking the comments for the upload on Deviantart finds him saying that he is Catholic:

Yes I am. I was inspired by Eastern Orthodox iconography when I made this piece though.

Though being a Christian doesn't necessarily mean he made the work for reasons related to Christianity.

Sounds like we can give him a pass on any bad intent, it sounds like he likes the anime art style, does work in it, and this was just an offshoot of wanting to do some anime figures as icons.

Reverent treatment in an inappropriate style is way down the list of "shit artists have pulled when dealing with Christian iconography", often literal shit.

Yep, I just saw @urquan's post with the same thing, and I think you are right that they are copying that icon. It seems that interpretations of the symbolism differ, which possibly accounts for the difference in red-over-blue (the majority of Orthodox icons) vs blue-over-red (the majority of Catholic icons (?), plus a handful of Orthodox ones).

I have no idea what the artist was thinking.

deleted

Ah, good catch there -- it does seem to be an exact imitation of that icon.

In the East, the liturgical color for Marian feasts is blue, and it's definitely the color most associated with her. I'm not enough of an expert to speculate on the history, but while the red-over-blue in icons of Mary is standard in the East, it is not universal (I think the Hagia Sophia famously has some icons which just use blue -- and indeed the source icon is Byzantine) so I guess I was wrong on that being the artist's error. There's some relation with the fact that Christ is generally depicted with a blue outer garment and red inner garment. I was just now trying to verify about the symbolism and found that there's some... disagreement... on exactly what symbolizes what.

This is a great elucidation.

To tie it to the contention I brought up:

Should we sacrifice our preferred racial representation of Aragorn in the name of racial justice in America?

Considering that Aragorn is not real and considering the high stakes for real marginalized people in America, I'd argue you need a very good reason to maintain the preference for approach 2. And I'd argue that if you would elevate your racial preference in fantasy over the realities of the marginalized minorities in America, you are, at the very least, implicitly racist.

  • -16

The thing is that the author gave us a description of Aragorn, and a setting, and that's not "21st century cosmopolitan multi-racial America".

It's like depicting George Washington as black - yeah, Hamilton got away with that, race-swapping the Founding Fathers, but in the end that was a gimmick and we all know that. Nobody believes Washington was really black. And if we depict Washington as black for one "real marginalized people", what about (Indian) Indians? Chinese? Hispanics? Where does it stop?

The better approach is to find real heroes, cultural or historical, from the marginalised peoples and elevate those.

And if saying "Fionn Mac Cúmhail was not born in Harlem as the descendant of West African slaves" makes me a racist, well then I'm a racist now, Father!

Making Aragorn black does not advance racial justice, but rather erodes it. Racial Justice is not advanced by convincing everyone that race is very, very important and should be a major consideration in every decision. If you manage to convince people of this, they will center race in their decision-making, and you will have more racism, not less.

Benign neglect is the only workable option available here. If people actually start caring about race, Blacks are fucked, because their community-average behavior is so goddamn bad that no amount of propaganda will help.

Aragorn is real as a part of culture and this is basically cultural appropriation. Except since Aragorn is copyrighted, the implication of cultural appropriayion is worse.

Icons are representative, not realistic. So you can (and should) adapt iconography to the ethnic and cultural makeup of the people using them in order to make them more relatable and less foreign. Hence you have black, white, Chinese, etc. icons of Jesus, Mary, and so on

This was overwhelming consensus of historical Christianity. No one had a problem painting ancient Israelite kings as contemporary rulers in appropriate royal dress and regalia, ancient Israelite warriors as contemporary armored knights, because they were kings and knights and should be recognized as ones.

"Realism" was not an issue.

I mean, that perspective is certainly important and present. There are lots of icons like that (and always have been; I think there are icons of Jesus looking like a Roman in the catacombs)! But I'm not convinced it was an overwhelming consensus across time and space (we're talking about probably more than 1900 years of practice over vast swaths of territory, not just medieval Europe).

My general sense is that people who hold to perspective (2) don't think that these icons are not real icons, just that they aren't ideal. This often applies to other aspects of iconography too; there's a lot of formal and informal rules about how icons are "supposed" to be painted in various Orthodox traditions, for instance, and a lot of people are somewhat uneasy with the "realistic" (western) style of many post-Peter-the-Great Russian icons.

Icons are interesting because they combine the symbolic and the representational; they depict people or events, but usually in a way that is symbolic and does not literally represent what happened. So "the icon is not a photograph, it is supposed to convey certain truths and should be painted in whatever way does that best" and "these are real people, you can't just make them look however you like" are both highly defensible, and have been defended. I'm inclined to the first one myself: we don't always have a good idea what the subjects looked like anyway, recognizability is more important than accuracy, and symbolism in e.g. clothing is uncontroversially more important than realism anyway.

My general sense is that people who hold to perspective (2) don't think that these icons are not real icons, just that they aren't ideal.

It has been a problem in Western art, too. You had Renaissance artists painting big, elaborate scenes allegedly based on Biblical sources but, uh, really not. Art historians tend to plump down on the side of "freedom of expression and developing one's art" rather than "this was supposed to be a Last Supper, not a rave at Studio 54":

The Feast in the House of Levi (1573) by Paolo Veronese was investigated by the Roman Inquisition, who asked, "Does it seem suitable to you, in the Last Supper of our Lord, to represent buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs, and other such absurdities?" and gave him three months to make changes. Veronese simply retitled it The Feast in the House of Levi.

We see this a lot with Caravaggio and the controversies over his naturalistic style when applied to religious subjects:

Caravaggio was known for painting very realistically, using models instead of standard convention and idealization.He made his figures lifelike and relatable, as opposed to portraying unrealistic or phony poses. In this instance, however, the patrons wanted an idealization of the beloved Saint, someone who its viewers could admire and strain to be like. They did not want a bumbling peasant who looked as if he just walked in off the street. With the angel sweeping down and the Saint's stool teetering in movement, it is arguably one of Caravaggio's earliest examples of his dynamic style. It was a much more exciting composition than the first. Even though Caravaggio changed the composition to suit the desires of the patron, you can still see his own style under the more refined subject of Saint Matthew.

...Caravaggio depicted the Saint as an unlearned peasant, gaping in the presence of the angel. The church rejected Caravaggio's irreverent presentation of the saint, and Caravaggio replaced it with a more glorifying image, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, which remains in the Chapel today.

...The lost painting showed Saint Matthew as poorly groomed, with dirty feet. Although this was the style of Caravaggio, the church leaders thought it was too crude and did not want to have what looked like a peasant hanging in their sacred altarpiece.

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