To the modern person, Byzantine and Russian ecclesiastical art often evokes mixed feelings: distorted proportions of face and body, the stylistic manner of depiction, but most questions are raised by seemingly incorrectly drawn geometric objects. It creates the impression that the artist who painted them could not draw. Is that so? Let's find out.
Icons often employ the principle of reverse perspective. Objects and people on them appear as if we are looking at them from different angles at the same time. For example, a book may be depicted so that all four of its planes are visible at once, and it will appear to expand into the distance. The same applies to the faces and figures of saints: we see them from the front, but at the same time we also see both shoulders turned toward us.
Unlike the linear perspective familiar to us, according to which parallel lines converge at a single point on the horizon, reverse perspective has its vanishing point not somewhere out there in the distance but inside the viewer himself. In other words, in Byzantine or Old Russian painting it is not we who look at the icon, but the icon that looks at us, or, as icon painters say, it shows us the grace flowing down from the heavenly realm onto us. This illustrates the otherworldly nature of the existence in which the icon's figures dwell.
This principle of depiction has several underlying reasons. The first lies in the medieval worldview, according to which, when depicting the divine world, one must not use worldly methods of representing another space. This also involves a mistrust of the human eye because of its carnal nature. Therefore a different method of constructing space is needed, one distinct from the one we are used to.
The second reason is the informativeness that this method of construction provides: the ability to unfold structures so that scenes and details 'hidden' by them are revealed, which is an advantage for iconographic narrative, given that for a long time the icon served as a Bible for the illiterate. Reverse perspective combines several viewpoints, each of which is transferred onto the image: thus we see an object simultaneously from above, from the left, and from the right.
There is also a theory that the idea of reverse perspective arose from observing diverging rays of light: the closer the projection of a ray is to the source, the narrower it is; the farther away, the wider.
In any case, ancient Russian icon painters were familiar with the laws of linear perspective but consciously did not adopt it. Thus reverse perspective preserved its spiritual meaning and continued the protest against the temptations of 'carnal vision'.
Aside from Byzantine and Russian icons, this device can be found in medieval art, in early Christian catacomb paintings, and in Romanesque and Gothic murals.
