Anthropology in colors: from icon to Painting

Emel'yanov Andrei Sergeevich PhD in Philosophy Senior Educator, the department of Philosophy, Kursk State University 305000, Russia, Kurskaya oblast', g. Kursk, ul. Radishcheva, 33, of. 325 andrei.e1992@mail.ru Other publications by this author

introduction

In semiotic terms, a person can be likened to some dictionary code, the decryption of which is his culture, and the discourse itself, conducted about a person, to some morphology, i.e., the order of connecting disparate morphemes into a certain integral structure. The difficulty in deciphering this dictionary, however, is that throughout the existence of human culture, we almost never deal with only one dictionary, which could be considered de facto as the key to its decryption, but always with several dictionaries. The language of this dictionary is in constant motion: the same morphemes, symbols and things change and transform.

In the framework of this study, we will turn to the transformation that took place in the semiotic and existential space of fine art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Using the example of the fundamental transformation of iconographic art in the XIII-XIV centuries, we will consider how an icon, acting as a kind of "levkas" of the pictorial language of the Middle Ages, is replaced by a painting and a painting canvas, becoming a new code in deciphering a person.

An icon and a painting are not only an expression of some pictorial practice that has a specific language of a specific historical epoch. Painting of the Middle Ages and Renaissance can be considered as a "mirror to the past", as a system of recognizing oneself as a person. If an icon is a language addressed, first of all, to God, where by ascending to the prototype a person recognizes himself as a God-man and thereby finds his salvation, then the picture, on the contrary, is a reflection of a person in whom he recognizes himself as the self-sufficient unit of the world, as a representation. In the painting, man is reflected as a Man-God. The transformation of this vector indicates the narcissistic nature of the development of not only art, but also prepares the ground for the emergence of anthropocentric and humanistic discourse in the intellectual space of the XIV-XV centuries.

I. THE ICON AS A MIRROR OF MAN IN GOD

 "Blessed are they who hear the Word of God and keep it" [Luke 11:28] – writes the apostle Luke. In relation to the medieval discourse about man, the word acquires a fundamental ontological and semiotic meaning. After all, the whole world, in which medieval man is immersed, is clothed in the form of a word, being a creation of God [see: 11; 12; 13]. In one of the hexameters of "Anticlavdiana" Alan Lilsky writes that "the whole world is a creation, like a book and an image" (omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et picture) ^{[28, 578C]}. Every event on the pages of this book or image (i.e. the world) should be considered as a letter or symbol, behind which some transcendent content is hidden. Each event in this coordinate system is considered as a kind of sign, which is called to testify about God, about the "eternal approach" to the apocalypse (revelation) and the Second Coming. In general, as L. points out. Ouspensky ^{[16, p. 70]}, if in the Old Testament God can only be heard (for example, by Moses from a blazing fire), then in the New Testament He can be seen. In this regard, the icon as a sacred image acted as an analogy of the Holy Scriptures and represented a certain stage in the development of the conversation about God, where communication is conducted in the language of colors.

The icon as a form of medieval painting fully corresponded to this existential horizon and represented a symbolic letter that communicated a certain code to a person. The code of the Middle Ages. As a form of fine art, the icon is a development of mosaic. At the same time, it is worth noting that the former does not displace the latter, but coexists with it. Like the preserved images on the walls of early Christian catacombs, basilicas and baptisteries, the icon was supposed to introduce the Word of God to parishioners through the image of Old Testament and New Testament themes ^{[9, p. 20]}. This was especially true for those of them who were illiterate. However, even for those who knew Greek, Aramaic or Latin, the visualization of religious content and its translation from the mental to the practical sphere, apparently, had to "turn to the prayers of God, sprinkle the heads of the earth and gird the loins with sackcloth, before the altarpiece fell" (2 Mac. 10: 25-26).

The most ancient icons that have come down to our time date back to the VI century. All of them, as a rule, are made in encaustic technique ("Christ Pantocrator", "Apostle Peter", "Martyrs Sergius and Vankh" in the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai). In general, in the pre-Iconoclastic era, the features of ancient naturalism are found in the most ancient icons (for example, orientation to human physiognomy, and not to symbolism). However, even in the icon of "Christos Pantokrator" mentioned above, along with the naturalism of the Savior's brushes and facial features (in which the influence of Fayum traditions of left and right asymmetry is revealed), we also find elements of symbolism – a halo, disembodied attire, a combination of the reverse (in the image of the Gospel) and the direct (in the image of the exedra in the background) prospects.

The use of anthropomorphic images in iconographic art was fixed at the Trull Cathedral (691-692). So, in particular, rule 82 stated: "We command from now on on icons, instead of the old lamb, to represent in human form the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, Christ our God" ^{[5, p. 161]}. This rule formulates the liturgicity of a religious image, similar to the liturgicity of a Sacred Text. It sets specific semiotic coordinates for the appearance of the icon, not as a kind of sacred symbol (which were the early Christian images of the lamb and fish), but as a Christian truth, which is a visualized answer to Pontius Pilate's famous question "What is truth?". A characteristic feature of the icon, as a form of verisdiction of Christian truth, is that it produces an answer to the question not what is the truth, but who is the truth. "She is a person, She is portrayed, therefore the Church <...> shows the Truth – the image of Jesus Christ" ^{[16, p. 80]}.

Hence, the personal horizon in the consideration of a person for the first time can be used only in relation to the icon and the image that it depicts. In this regard, two differential levels have always been distinguished in icons, which were strictly regulated in the "originals". We are talking about the differentiation in the icon of the "personal" (that which referred to the face and its bodily parts of the figure) and the "personal" (that which did not relate to the face). When writing an icon, as a rule, "dolichnoe" (vestments, chambers, slides) was written first and only then "personal" images of saints were applied, regulated by facial and sensible originals. Thus, the facial originals were a compendium of the prosaic features and bodily figures of the depicted saints, which had to be followed when writing. The explanatory originals contained only verbal descriptions and instructions for writing this or that saint, as well as this or that iconographic plot. Based on the presence of such indications and regulations of iconographic art, a specific compositional content of the icon is formed. The compositional content of an icon, according to iconographic terminology, is a translation or copy that is made from a certain sample, i.e. it is copied from some text or image.

Speaking about iconographic art as a form of copying (lists, drawings and symbols), we should note that the icon is given a central place in communication between man and God. According to the famous formula of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, "things revealed are truly icons of things invisible." Turning to an icon (as well as writing it) becomes the art of remembering or ascending from the sensual to the supersensible, from the "lower" to the "higher", from the human to the divine. According to Averintsev, it was on this platonic foundation that Byzantine iconography built its "theory" of the icon "as a representation separated from its prototype by some important difference, but allowing the "energies" of the prototype to actually be present in it, this representation" ^{[1, p. 47]}.

The icon, like the medieval Gothic cathedral ^[6] or the encyclopedia of Vincent of Beauvais, turns out to be a mirror of the world (speculum mundum), refracting the divine primordial image within the framework of the medieval worldview. The use of anthropomorphic elements in the icon, implicitly makes the image of the person from whom the original image is written and into which it is embedded, a central element in the communication of the Creator and creation. Returning to Alan Lilsky, the world, of course, is a word, i.e. a creation similar to a book and an image, but "he [the world] is a reflection of ourselves" (nobis est et speculum). In this sense, iconographic art prepares an anthropocentric horizon in the consideration of man. In relation to the icon, man turns out to be a connecting element between natura naturans and natura naturata, between creation and the prototype. Thanks to the anthropomorphism of the icon, a person finds the opportunity to be deified, that is, to find salvation by repeating the path of Christ, who became a man, executed for human sins and "found eternal life."

The degree of this anthropomorphism in the icon has constantly varied throughout its development. In the East, in iconography, anthropomorphism is closely adjacent to areal symbolism, as opposed to Western naturalism. The combination of backward and forward perspectives in the compositional space, the "twisting of figures" and their doubling in the transmission of a time sequence [see: 15 p. 364; 372], the combination of internal and external positions (and many other aspects) make iconographic art areal, non-physical, disembodied and therefore so deep and spiritual. The icon here is not intended to "depict" God, but to remove the veils from him. That is why, as Florensky writes, the iconographer "does not compose an image of himself, but only removes the covers from an already, and moreover, a very real image; he does not put paint on the canvas, but, as it were, clears away extraneous deposits of his "record" of spiritual reality" ^{[17, p. 80]}.

However, to remove the veil from the truth does not mean to portray the image in a naturalistic way. In the "Heavenly Hierarchy" Dionysius the Areopagite writes: "if, in relation to Divine objects, the negative image of expression is closer to the truth than the affirmative, then when describing invisible and incomprehensible beings, it is incomparably more decent to use images that are dissimilar to them. Because sacred descriptions, depicting heavenly orders in features dissimilar to them, thereby give them more honor than infamy, and show that they are above all materiality" ^{[29, I, 3]}. The latter circumstance makes iconography the language of apophatic theology in colors, and man one of the elements of the denial of the "invisible and incomprehensible"beings of God.

In the Western tradition we find a completely different attitude to the Divine truth and, consequently, to the pictorial means of its transmission. In Alan Lilsky's The Lament of Nature, we encounter the paradox of the "ineffability of the divine mystery" (ineffabile deitatis arcanum) ^{[28, 0444C]}. Bernard Sylvester has a position according to which the divine mystery does not need its discovery and disclosure. This mystery must be hidden behind numerous wrappers (involucrum) and veils (integumentum) of colorful metaphors and colorful allegories of a fairy tale story, as at the same time a form of proof of the presence of the mystery and its safe haven ^[4]. Thus, the Western tradition of naturalism in the iconographic art of the Middle Ages should be understood as the allegorism of the human, in which a person (and an anthropomorphic image) he himself becomes an allegory or a mystery of God.

At the same time, the opposition of Western and Eastern traditions, at least up to the XIII century, is, in our opinion, quite conditional. The fact is that there was no such "Western" tradition in icon painting. For example, the icons of "Salus Populi Romani" (VII-VIII centuries) in Santa Maria Maggiore, "Madonna d'araceli" (X-XI centuries) and "Madonna di SantAlessio", not to mention the icons of the so-called "workshops of the Crusaders", are of Byzantine origin. Byzantine influence is found not only in iconography, but also in Gothic architecture ^{[6; 8]}. Even in the works of Cimabue ("Madonna on the Throne" or his triptychs "Crucifixion" and "Madonna" in San Francesco in Assisi), who is considered the last painter who worked in the "old" style, the Byzantine influence is so strong that some experts (not unreasonably) consider him and one of his students – Giotto – just an imitator of Byzantine iconography [see: 19, s. 174; 20]. In other words, the juxtaposition of Western and Eastern painting (relevant, for example, for the Old Russian disputes of the XV-XVII centuries in relation to Fryazhsky writing) is a relatively late phenomenon in the history of iconographic art ^{[2, p. 107; 7, p. 28]}.

Anthropomorphism and the resulting naturalism have been an integral feature of icon painting throughout its history. It is not a stylistic feature of Western culture alone and arises within the framework of the Byzantine style. A particularly strong influence of naturalism is found in the period of the Macedonian Renaissance, which followed the era of iconoclasm. In particular, we are talking about the mosaic "The Virgin and Child" in the apse of St. Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople, as well as in the icon "Abgar receives the Miraculous Image of Jesus Christ" in the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai. Some departure from naturalism is found in the ascetic iconography of the X century. There is a clear line of departure from classicism and samples of Hellenistic painting with its attention to detail, as well as the transition to disembodyness and soaring, a vivid example of which is the icon of the "Apostle Philip" (X century), as well as the pre-Mongolian iconography of Ancient Russia (for example, the icons "Apostles Peter and Paul" or "Saved the Golden Robe" in St. Sophia Cathedral of Novgorod).

In the future, the departure and at the same time the return of naturalistic themes in icon painting can be found in the periods of the Komnenian and Paleologo Renaissance. The "animation" and dynamism of the depicted figures are distinctive features of both the first and the second. Examples of this compositional development are the icons of the "Twelve Apostles" and "Assumption of the Mother of God" of the XIV century, which are kept in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. At the same time, in these works (and in some others) we encounter unrealistic motives (elongation of figures, their torsion, combining perspectives, as well as compaction of space). Special attention should be paid to the emotionality appearing on a number of icons, which brings the primordial image and the person closer. A striking example of this symbolic touch is the "Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God", where the icon painter pays central attention to the emotional contact of the cheeks of the Virgin and the Baby. A similar emotional ("touching") touch is also contained in the icon "Madonna and Child on the Throne", belonging to the brush of Coppo di Marcovaldo.

Along with emotionality, the use of plots and figures turned to the "second plane" and not directly related to the canonical text of Holy Scripture, as well as lists of images, has become an innovation. An example of this iconographic style is the icon of the Annunciation, where in the center, behind one of the columns, a Byzantine iconographer places a maidservant who stealthily becomes a witness of the Good News from the Archangel Gabriel. Another example is the fresco "The Last Supper" by Pietro Lorenzetti in San Francesco in Assisi, where the next room is depicted on the left side with servants washing kitchen utensils, a sleeping cat and a dog licking a plate.

       Pietro Lorenzetti. The Last Supper (beginning XIV). Assisi, Church of San Francesco

Unknown master. Annunciation (XIV century). Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

The scenic and ease of these images discharge the semiotic space of the icon, shifting the parishioner's view from the divine, symbolic and eternal themes to the purely personal, human and realistic themes. Diverts the gaze from the eternal questions to the questions of the mundane. Thanks to a number of these and other stylistic features, next to the prototype of God and the saints, the outlines of a person begin to appear. Man is increasingly ceasing to be an allegory of God, his imprint, or just a frontispiece in a God-human project. On the contrary, "divine genius" and "universal creativity" become the leading narratives in the representation of man.

II. PERSPECTIVE AND OIL PAINTING

In the famous Frederico Fellini film "Amarcord" Giotto is called the father of modern linear perspective in painting. Michel Foucault attributes a similar achievement to the Italian artist in his course of lectures "Painting by Manet". Currently, this position does not stand up to argument, since the opposite has been proven: Giotto was not the one who first discovered or began to use a linear (i.e. direct) perspective as opposed to the reverse perspective of iconographic painting. Direct perspective appears long before the Ducento era and is a product of Hellenistic art. In the iconographic art of the Middle Ages, the forward perspective is used as often as the reverse. Often, in the same icon, we are faced with the fact that some objects and figures are depicted on it in a direct perspective (for example, the interior of the premises), and some in the reverse (chambers, vestments, slides) ^{[15, p. 234]}.

At the same time, transformations in the visual arts of the XIII century were not least connected with perspective, namely, the wider use of the direct and the almost complete displacement of the reverse from painting [see: 9]. In our opinion, this technical and semiotic transformation in the compositional space of the image sets one of the main vectors for turning an icon into a painting.

Analyzing Renaissance sources from a direct perspective, it can be noted that this topic was not new to European intellectuals. Despite the fact that Medieval Europe did not know the original texts of Euclid and Ptolemy on the theory of the "cone of vision", many of their ideas were drawn from Arabic sources. Roger Bacon relies on the latter to a greater extent in his treatise "Perspectiva", which is the fifth part of his "Opus Majus", which was very popular at that time. There is no doubt at the moment that the famous text of Vitruvius "On Architecture" was also known to the Middle Ages, in which the technical aspects of the use of direct perspective are revealed, although this text will find its "revival" already during the Renaissance.

If we talk about the Renaissance itself and its attention to this problem, then one of the first ways to use direct perspective are the works of Filippo Lippi and Paolo Uccello, who (albeit somewhat simplified) introduce not one point of view, but several. Other noteworthy works are the treatises of Piero della Francesca "De prospective pingendi" (On perspective in painting), as well as Alberti's "Della pittura" (On painting) ^{[18, p. 179]}, in which the thesis of the reliance of painting on the achievements of optics is defended. The idea of perspective according to these two independent authors can be conditionally reduced to the fact that when constructing a picture, it is necessary to use a cross-section of the optical pyramid with a plane, which allows you to depict a thing and a figure more realistically. At the beginning of the third book of the treatise on perspective, Piero della Francesca points out that Giotto used perspective in his canvases, relying on the famous text of Vitruvius ^{[18, p. 180]}. Largely due to this, Luca Pacioli in "Sums of Arithmetic" will be quite flattering to speak about those artists who measure their works with a ruler and a compass and thereby bring it to perfection. We find great attention to the idea of perspective not only in Italy, but also in the Northern Renaissance. In particular, Albrecht Durer's hand belongs to the treatise "On Perspective". Leonardo da Vinci is also carrying out a decisive reform of perspective, using the method of synthetic perspective. According to this method, the image on the canvas of the painting was considered not as a projection on a plane, but as a projection on a sphere.

The interpretation of perspective transformation in Renaissance painting, given within the framework of the Russian religious and philosophical tradition, deserves special attention. Thus, in the well-known work "Speculation in Colors" Trubetskoy argues that the technical transformation of the image associated with the use of direct perspective essentially makes "personal communication of a person with the prototype impossible" ^{[14, p. 21]}. In the famous text "Reverse Perspective" Florensky even asks the question of the ontology of the picture and the foundations of "its perspective image of the world, a perspective image of the world." Is the picture a natural image of the world, "consequently, the true word of the world, or is it just a special spelling"? ^{[17, p. 48]}.

In general, the negative assessment of the wider use of direct perspective, which has developed in the Russian religious and philosophical tradition, was not a rejection of technical innovation, but rather testified to the formation of a completely new "spelling" of the world in this historical era. With the secularization of the religious worldview of the Middle Ages, iconography is transformed into religious painting (for example, Van Eyck's "Ghent Altar"), where the religious plot itself turns out to be only a "pretext for depicting the body and landscape" ^{[17, p. 66]}, and is not the goal itself. That is why, within the framework of religious painting by Giotto, Van Eyck or Raphael, we can say that the main character of the image here is no longer a God-man, but a Man-God.

We see that the icon and the painting represent two completely opposite poles in the "spelling" of the world. The world understood, on the one hand, as a word and, on the other hand, the world understood as a representation. According to its semiotic content, the icon is polycentric, i.e. it contains many centers and projections of views on this very center, and the picture, on the contrary, is monocentric. The painting, unlike the icon (which "illuminates" and thus, as it were, scatters the view or decenerates it) is designed to collect and connect the converging lines of the canvas. The polycentricity of the icon is achieved by many technical touches. In particular, the use of reverse and forward perspective, torsion and disembodied figures, through its "renovation", as well as the use of the reverse side to write plots that at first glance do not correlate with the front side in any way. The monocentricity of the picture is a consequence of the naturalization and rationalization of the world. Hence, the widespread use of camera obscura when painting a huge number of paintings (Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer of Delphi), which turns out to be, in a sense, a rationalization of the human view of the world around him.

At the same time, the naturalization of the depicted in the initial period of the XIV century contains many features of Gothic art associated with the use of a certain kind of distortion of direct perspective. Typical examples of such "Gothic distortions" are the elongated figures of the characters and the distortion of the floor in the painting "Portrait of the Arnolfini Couple" by Jan Van Eyck, as well as the combination of two "points of view" in "Madonna Litte" and "Madonna with Carnation" by da Vinci.

The latter circumstance indirectly indicates that the transformation of perspective in the visual arts of the XIV-XV centuries is far from the only reason for the conversion of an icon into a painting. Another important touch in the naturalization of the depicted is the revolution of oil technique, which since the time of Vasari has traditionally been attributed to Jan Van Eyck and Rogier Van der Weyden ^[34]. Despite studies [see: 8; 25] indicating that the oil technique was known long before the beginning of the XIV-XV centuries (Pliny the Elder, Theophilus, the Strasbourg Manuscript), most authors ^{[3, p. 14-15; 8, p. 20]} agree that it was the Flemish masters of the Northern Renaissance who brought this technique to perfection.

The extensive use of paints allowed to achieve the depth of the image, bypassing the symbolism characteristic of iconographic art. The detail and clarity of the drawing of the folds of clothing and facial expressions, as well as the play of chiaroscuro, became the development of naturalization and rationalization of the world in which a person of that era lived. Here, unlike in the Middle Ages, the world turns out to be filled no longer with signs and symbols hiding an otherworldly meaning. The world turns out to be permeated with coordinates and causal chains that define a completely new "geometry of the world". This is no longer a "geometry of symbols" imprinted in the form of revelation, but a "geometry of feelings" that reveals the world through passionate inspirations and inspirations of the person himself. 

III. PAINTING AS A MIRROR OF A PERSON

In the fourth book of the treatise "The Feast", Dante writes in his elegant manner that "one cannot write a face to someone [who has not made himself one before] (poi chi pinge figura [se non pu? esser lei, non la pu? porre])" ^{[30, X, 10.]}. Despite this, enough, the narcissistic message, the transformation of the icon into a painting was dictated not at all by the rapid development of humanistic literature, but by the process of renewal that took place within the framework of medieval metanaration, in particular in the church.

In general, if we talk about the genetics of the origin and development of ars nova, we should highlight the following reasons that influenced this process:

Firstly, the improvement of the technique mentioned above, which includes innovation in the use of oil painting. The discovery made by Van Eyck and Van der Weyden allowed the artists to work with several layers of paints (lasing), achieving spectacular expressiveness in the transfer of folds of clothing, facial features and many other components, achieving a high degree of dramaturgy of the image. Another important circumstance is the more reliable, in comparison with images made in tempera, the safety of canvases. The latter was influenced by geography. The damp climate of Northern and Western Europe did not allow the use of the fresco and the tempera characteristic of its painting, as it was, for example, in Italy.

Secondly, the appearance of the painting and (if we consider in more detail) the appearance of the pictorial content was influenced by the processes of "renewal" of the XIV century in the Catholic Church. St. Peter's Church was discredited by the "Avignon captivity", the Great Western Schism and corruption scandals, and therefore was in dire need of the "return" of parishioners to the parishes of churches. In order for this to happen, the church needed a "spectacle". Hence (paradoxically) the process of naturalization of the image, which began with the "renewal" of religious subjects and the expansion of the use of anthropomorphic features, namely the Renaissance, arises largely due to the attempt of the Roman Catholic Church to solve the internal crisis.

The development of portraiture and close attention to the precise and emotional detail of physiognomy was associated with the idea of "bringing" religious content to the daily life of a person of that era. Instead of symbolic images of the Virgin, the naturalism and eroticism of the Madonna come, which is written not from the liturgical image (list) of the Apostle Luke, but from an ordinary person. The "face" of a person, with its inherent emotionality (bitterness, fear, admiration or thoughtfulness) becomes an inexhaustible and therefore necessary element of an existential puzzle named "man". Thus, the picture frame frames no longer a face that refers to God, but a face that refers to some idea or image of a person. Man himself, as an independent concept and unit of philosophical research, did not yet exist. It had yet to be "created" or "painted" on the ruins and fragments of speculative scholasticism.

At the same time, the humanistic narrative developed the idea that man, as a self-sufficient being, an active mind and a creator, is a product of the Roman-Hellenistic era. So Ghiberti in his "Notes" declares that after ten centuries of delusion and stagnation (scholasticism), "new" painting, sculpture and architecture have gained a "rebirth" and the power of the ancients. In its chronology, the XV century follows immediately after the IV century ^[31]. Alberti in his treatise "On Painting", and after him Verino in "The Glorification of Florence", goes even further, making an attempt to fully identify Filippo Lippi with Apelles, and Sandro Botticelli with Zevkis. A similar view was held by Petrarch, Salutati and Bruni. Careful study of the art of antiquity was one of the primary tasks of the famous school of artists under Lorenzo de' Medici, the school of San Marco, which Vasari calls the "nursery of geniuses" and "academy" ^{[34, IV, 356; VII, 141]}.Thus, Italian humanists developed the thesis that the basic principles of ars nova were discovered long before them in Ancient Greece and Rome.

Since genius as such is timeless and immortal, culture and art itself were considered here in a platonic way, as eternal remembrance (anamnesis). Hence naturalism and realism in the depiction of man was not something new, but on the contrary, was one of the characteristic features of the return to the art of antiquity. Thus, the technique of refined physiognomy and the method of drawing transparent clothes, according to Pliny, was associated with the name Polygnot. Namely: "He was the first to serve painting very much, since he began to represent the slightly open mouth, teeth in it, depicting the face in a way different from the ancient stiffness" (Plurinum picturae primus contulit, siquidem instituit os aperite, dentes ostendere, voltum ad antique rigore variare ^{[24, 58]}). According to the Malabekkyan anonymous ^{[18, p. 202]}, Renaissance artists took the color of colors and shades from Zevkis, the rapture of the image from Parrassia, and the charm (venustas) from Apelles. The latter was such an authoritative figure for Botticelli that he considered himself the heir of his school, which is indirectly indicated by literary evidence noting that he managed to recreate two main works of Apelles: "Aphrodite Anadyomena" and "Slander" ^{[24, 91]}.

In contrast to medieval iconography, which expressed the idea of saving man through his deification, Renaissance artists relied on the Roman-Hellenistic concept of the metamorphosis of nature through art. The expansion of visual and expressive means was due to the fact that drawing occupies an initial and one of the central places in the metamorphosis of a person, which is carried out thanks to a certain artistic technique. For Donattello, drawing is a kind of beginning and foundation of any sculpture or architectural structure that comes to life through animatio through imitation. Since the soul is inherent not only in man, but also in nature, the artist or sculptor, with the help of paints and stichel, only animates matter and substance. The creative process is thus likened to the creation of the world by God. The artist and the sculptor are actually creating a "new world" where "the soul is the source of movement." At the same time, the "new world" created by the artist implies a new physics, as well as a new geometry of interaction in the world. As Ficino writes, "from the fact that the soul is the source of movement, the free and universal activity" of man follows ^{[32, III, 1]}.

For Renaissance artists, metamorphoses in nature can be likened to the metamorphosis of the human body because there is the closest and deepest analogy between the world and man. It is no secret that the abstract correspondence of the microcosm (man) and the macrocosm (world) was a fundamental principle not only for the XV century, but also earlier in the XI-XII centuries. However, in the XV century, the main content of metamorphosis and the understanding of its nature underwent a significant change, which led to the appearance of two diametrically opposite positions in Italian Neoplatonism.

The first, earlier, dating back to ancient sources on hermeticism and Pythagoreanism, although artfully veiled in the shell of Platonic terminology, belongs to Marsilio Ficino. According to his position, metamorphosis is considered as a certain kind of "animism". In the "Treatise on Water" and in the IV book of Platonic Theology, this "animism of living nature" is revealed through the interaction of the world elements, each of which is a "factory of life" (vita fabricatrix). In order to imagine this "factory of life", an analogy is needed with human art and production, which process and transform (transmutatio) matter into beautiful beings. Namely: "Nature acts with art all the more life-giving and ingenious because it produces more beautiful beings in a more faithful way" ^{[32, IV, 1.]}.

The second position belongs to Leonardo and arises somewhat later. Da Vinci's view was influenced by the tradition of Poimander, the anonymous hermeneutic "Treatise on the Sphere" translated by Goro Dati, as well as Marullo's "Hymns and Epigrams". Of considerable importance were also the texts of Ficino, already mentioned by us, in particular his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius and two treatises on the Sun. So, according to this position, which can be conditionally designated as "narcissistic", a person opens not as a "soul of nature", but as one of the accidentally snatched tricks of the world, as a certain accident in the bosom of the cosmos, and not as one of its emanations. According to Leonardo, a person in the process of metamorphosis does not "transform" into something different from himself. A person is "highlighted" against the background of another and thereby "recognizes" himself as a person and as the "center of the Universe".

The difference in understanding the metamorphosis of the human soul in the positions of Ficino and Leonardo was most clearly manifested in the interpretation of Plato's myth of the cave. This difference indicates not only the existence of two independent schools in Italian Neoplatonism, but also a different understanding within the two arts (philosophy and painting) of nature and, most importantly, physicality as one of the letters in the image of a person. According to Ficino, "the body and its soul are united with great greed, and part with great sorrow" (Corpora animis suis et junguntur avidissime et ad eis molestissime sejunguntur) ^{[32, II, 3]}. A person is a kind of "cave" or a state in which the soul (as if in prison) is chained in the "shackles" of physicality. For Leonardo, as his paintings show (for example, "Adoration of the Magi" and "Madonna in the Grotto"), the cave is not at all a dungeon of the soul, but a certain focus of vision, and only one of a huge set. Man is a "focus" set in the space between the terrible and the delightful, the ugly and the perfect, the authentic and the illusory. A person is called upon to emphasize the highlighting significance of light, expressing it through shadow and vice versa. Hence, in our opinion, Leonardo's great attention to the contour of the objects of the painting. From this original style, in fact, stems his revolutionary technique "sfumato" and the famous game with chiaroscuro. In da Vinci's paintings, the human face and its physicality come forward and shade the background. For example, the mist on the canvases "Mona Lisa" and "Anna, Maria, the baby and the lamb", or the rocky background in the painting "Madonna in the Grotto". At the same time, when Leonardo needs to show an ideal symbol of human ambiguity and expectation, he seeks to link together "a half-darkness, a wandering smile" and "a finger pointing into darkness" ^{[22, p. 124]}. At the same time, the smile and the detailed image of the mouth in the picture has an important symbolic purpose. After all, the mouth is the "dwelling" of the human soul, as Ficino wrote.

According to Leonardo, the true metamorphosis of coarse and formless matter, and the "birth of man" is possible only within the boundaries of the painting. In order for a person as an idea to find his opportunity, the painter needs not only "to know the anatomy of nerves, bones, muscles and tendons", to know "about different movements and manifestations of force, which nerve, which muscle is their culprit" ^{[33, 61]}. In addition to knowledge, some creative effort is needed. According to Leonardo, the spirit of the painter is carried like the Spirit of God and animates matter. "For he gives himself with free power to the creation of various entities: animals, plants, fruits, landscapes, rural views, mountain cliffs, places terrible and terrible, striking the viewer, places pleasant and tender" ^{[33, 68]}. By painting, the painter becomes like God and thereby carries out the metamorphosis of matter in a work of art. He creates a man like God, drawing him on the canvases of his paintings and sculpting a statue or small plastic out of him.

The mind, the technical skill of the artist and the architect, as well as the mind of the philosopher turn out to be a certain yardstick in which a person and the "attributes" of things are reflected as if in a mirror. Thus, the picture turns out not to be a projection of the humanist's view of the world around him, but an inner tablet, which is originally inherent in the world as a picture. The picture turns out to be a reflection of the world and a constant of this world. The painting and the sphere of art as a whole are such an existential space in which the soul recognizes itself as a person. This passage finds its confirmation in Leonardo's lyrical passage about the artist as the "lord of the universe", whose main purpose is to reflect the "harmony of relations" ^{[33, 27]}. It is man who turns out to be the connecting element and harmony between the cosmos and the world, nature and spirit, and the picture is a reflection of this harmony.

A painting depicting a person is a reflection of the harmony of the world. However, this world is no longer a Word that sought to capture and convey iconographic art. This world is a reflection of man himself. The world, understood as a picture, turns out to be one of the ontological conditions for self-discovery in it. A condition for discovering oneself as a person. Starting from this narcissistic message, one can even say, as Polizano's collection of aphorisms conveys, following Cosimo de' Medici, that "every artist writes himself" (Ogni dipintore dipinge se) ^{[26, s. 150]}. In other words, what is depicted in the painting is the content of the artist's inner self. It is a reflection of yourself as a person.

The metaphor of the mirror is a distinctive feature of narcissistic discourse not only in Renaissance painting (for example, in Van Eyck's Portrait of the Arnolfini Couple or in Velasquez's Menines), but also in philosophical space. It appears in Ficino's "Platonic theology" – "the mirror reflecting the face" (32, X, 4). In his treatise On Painting, Durer writes that "vision is like a mirror" ^{[27, 240]}. Developing the aphorism of Cosimo de' Medici already mentioned above, Leonardo in the Treatise on Painting gives the following psychophysiological interpretation of the painting as a mirror: "I knew others whose faces all seemed to be their portraits from nature, in which the actions and movements of their creators were seen (Ne ho cognosciuti alcuni che in tutte le sue figure pareva avervisi ritratto al natural e in quelle si vede li atti e li moti del loro fattore)" ^{[33, 76]}. The last thought emphasizes the fundamental importance of human nature in the depiction of religious and metaphorical contents. For example, the nature of Simonetta Vespucci, used by Botticelli in the depiction of Venus. The development of this narcissistic narrative is undoubtedly self-portraits, in which any boundary between artistic genius and religious content is often erased. In particular, in Van der Weyden's painting "The Evangelist Luke painting the Madonna" we meet with a self-portrait of the artist himself, who is depicted in the image of St. Luke (the "father" of iconography). The famous Nuremberg Self-Portrait of 1500 by Albert Durer deserves special attention, where the artist himself is an object of image worthy of perpetuation in history. Interestingly, one hundred and thirty years later, Georg Fischer used Durer's self-portrait as a model for the image of Christ in the painting "Christ and the Sinner".

          Albrecht Durer. Self-portrait in a fur skirt (1500). Munich, Old pinanoteka

Georg Fischer. Christ and the Sinner (1637). Munich, Old pinanoteka

This parallelism of images indicates that Durer's self-portrait, praising the creative potential of the artist as a semblance of the divine, by 1600 itself became an "icon of Renaissance art" ^{[10, p. 247]}, from which other works of art are written as if from an iconographic list. The latter circumstance turns out to be a decisive turn in the visual arts, making, in fact, a person and the idea of a person an icon, from which, as if thrown into the mirror surface of water, the lines of Madonnas, ascending to the faces of the Virgin and the lines of saints, in whose images humanists draw themselves, diverge in waves. Man is transformed from a metaphor, which he was at the dawn of the XIV century, into a literature and an image around which a humanistic discourse about man develops. 

conclusion

The painting, in a semiotic and ontological sense, is a logical and historical development of iconographic art. A number of similar technical and substantive features make an icon and a painting only poles of the same process. The process of "creation" and construction of anthropological discourse, in which iconography and painting represent one of the historical stages in the development of a certain "orthography" of the language of fine art. The language of colors, silhouettes and compositions in which each historical epoch conducts its "eternal conversation about man".

In our opinion, the Christian conversation about the salvation of man as a discourse about God-man is transformed in the XIII-XIV centuries into a humanistic one, as a discourse about Man-God. The change of this vector is found not only in the fields of philosophical, literary and theological treatises, but also in the space of fine art. The icon, as an expression of the discourse about the God-man in colors, is transformed here into a picture, as the horizon of the existential discovery of man as a creator.

To depict God, medieval art turns out to need a person. Using anthropomorphic elements, mixing naturalistic physiognomy with areal symbolism, man as an allegory of God is woven into the general canvas of the world, understood as the creation and reflection of the Creator. At the same time, the processes of iconoclasm of the VIII century in Byzantium and the XV-XVI centuries in Western Europe revealed a very acute and in many aspects poorly studied theme of narcissism in the visual arts. To what extent can an anthropomorphic image depicted on an icon or on an altar leaf, where religious characters are written from some speculative list or from some nature, be a prototype? On the other hand, is not the rejection of the anthropomorphic realism of the image of God, as it happened in the iconoclastic movement, also a rejection of the God-human horizon, which means the actual rejection of the idea of the salvation of mankind – the central element of Christian exegesis? 

The latter circumstance hints to us that the icon and the painting represent not only a certain form of fine art of the past, but also a certain historical stage in the development of narcissism, which existed in parallel with the themes of human deification and the anthropocentric discourse of the Renaissance.