Abstract
This article seeks to make the work of the Bulgarian icon painter Julia Stankova better known to readers. It does so first by presenting her person, her trajectory, and her iconographical work. Then it offers an overview of her reflection on the relationships between the Bible and the icon. Finally, it analyzes a dozen icons that she has produced over the past twenty years on the theme of the Hospitality of Abraham as recounted in Genesis 18.
Highlights
There we find much already; Julia Stankova is one of those artists who can disclose herself without dissimulation
A given generation’s new wine of perceiving Holy Scripture must be put into new wineskins, that is, poured into an original iconographical language, lest it be spoiled by bursting the old wineskins—the old iconographical styles.[32]. This conviction comes quite close to the one expressed for the first time with such clarity in the Roman magisterial tradition. It appears in the seventh chapter of Vatican II’s famous constitution, Sacrosanctum concilium (1965), where we find the substantial declaration that “the Church has never made any style its own.”[33]. Each epoch and region is left to invent its own style; here the Church recognizes in persons a non-programmable “right of response” and the fact that every baptized person is called to invent his or her own form of sanctity
I wanted to see how these ideas were illustrated and borne out in her work on a Biblical passage highly respected in iconography—the Hospitality of Abraham as recounted in chapter 18 of the book of Genesis, which inspired inter alia Andrei Rublev’s much celebrated icon of the Trinity
Summary
During November and December of 2018, a young Serbian who lives in Hamburg, Nikola Sarić, displayed in a Paris art gallery a series of icons that were innovative (to put it mildly) from a stylistic point of view, and in their subject matter—the Gospel parables, for instance.[17] Still elsewhere, especially in Eastern European countries and in the studios of iconographers working in the West under the guidance of Orthodox thinkers (we think of a mosaic artist such as Marie-Noëlle Garrigou in France, and of Bose and Seriate’s studios in Italy), in a far less showy and more tranquil manner certain iconographers have begun to reflect fundamentally upon the danger presented by the very idea of a “canon” in this domain.
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