From the visible form painted on an icon, the mind and our thoughts are raised to the desire and  love of God and worship not an object but the view and the form of the beauty of His divine presence. The icon is considered to be the contact of the present life with the future ages, because the love that results to the represented  person is of such nature that links the terrestrial life with that, where the bodies of Saints will be brighter than the sun.

A genuine agiographer owes to communicate with the depicted person - prototype not only via his communion in the body of church, but with his own experience of sanctification also. He owes to be a  painter – creator, that accepts and reveals the holiness of another human,  through his own experience. From the spiritual experience of the painter  and the degree of his connection with the prototype, it is that depends the creative energy on his work.

The exterior beauty of  the icon is synonymous of the spiritual beauty of a saint and the perceptible sense of this beauty is due to the prayer of mind.

In the orthodox ecclesiastical art the main subject,  not to say the one and only, is the person. No other art pays so much attention and raises man to the level that a holly icon does. Everything depicted is referred to the man. The landscape, the animals, the plants... In the hierarchy of beings the person has the dominating place. It is the centre of the universe and the world that surrounds it, is presented in the situation that its holiness transmits .

In the Byzantine art the term "style" is interpreted by the word "way" because the style concerns mainly the scripts. More generally the orthodox ecclesiastical painting, life and thought, is not characterized by a style but by a way, since the style has intensely individual character. Perhaps the ideocratic painting, the painting that is worked on ideas, could express a painting style as romantic, classic, symbolic, but by no means could the ecclesiastical painting. The "Byzantine style would constitute the tragic alteration in a decorative, folkloric type of painting, of the alive and full of Divine Grace ecclesiastical life of ours, characteristic of which is the realistic and empiric way of life and thought.

The above lines determine in general the borders of the Byzantine iconography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Leonid Ouspensky, The theology of picture in the orthodox church