People in marketing routinely talk about “iconic” brands and “iconoclastic” personalities. I’m sure Richard Branson has at least once been referred to as “iconically iconoclastic.”

But what does it really mean to be iconic and iconoclastic?  Ikenei in Greek means to “look like.”  An icon is a likeness.  

The oldest monastery in the world also has one of the oldest icons, the Pantocrater, Lord of All.  Icons were made by monks as aids to personal prayer and as worship. When we say “iconoclastic” we are using a word whose origins date back 1,200 years ago in a movement in the Byzantine Empire which sought to stamp out the use of icons.  Their contention: “graven images,” forbidden in the Ten Commandments, fixate our imaginations on the visible and tangible and thereby make God smaller.  The movement gained considerable ground and it nearly triumphed – paralleling the emergence of Islam’s ban of secular religious art. The consequences of its triumph would have considerably diminished the vivid richness of the world we live in today.

But the doctrine of the Incarnation ultimately prevailed in favor of icons.  Orthodoxy declared Jesus to be both God and Man and, from this idea issued forth a sense that the world around us is not a lesser, coarser experience of the divine.  Everything that comes to us through the senses is intrinsically good and it is only by our will that it can be made bad.  Our minds were made to understand the world.  To explore the world in the confidence that it is ultimately knowable and understandable is therefore an act of faith.  There is no division between Faith and Reason.  If the world appears irrational, it is because we do not yet understand it.  This sense of life ultimately gave birth to the first universities and to the sometimes fitful starts of open, rational and free scientific inquiry.

Concurrent with this, the development of iconography, an ancient art form still alive throughout the Christian world, represented a desire to create images that would help us draw nearer to invisible presence of God in our lives.  Traditionally, icons are painted by gifted monks in monasteries.  Icons are created one at a time as image-prayers, not just ordinary art.  Their hieratic values, their balance of sumptuous color and austere poses are intended to capture the emotion of the soul at its most awake.

To the didactic and contemplative mission of iconography came the lush grandeur of Renaissance realism, perspective landscapes and a myriad of pealing decorative elements such as those on display in Botticelli’s Magnificat.

But we enter the full height of the Renaissance in the staggering polymathic genius of Leonardo for whom painting was in fact just one of many fields of ceaseless, roving labor.  His scattered and few precious paintings, many left undone, continue to haunt us with their superhuman genius leaving traces of its exhausting quest of the impossible.

The National Gallery in London has put together a once-in-a-lifetime collection of Leonardo’s sketches, drawings and paintings that is attracting record crowds with ticketed entrance times required to regulate the crush of visitors - with many tickets selling in illegal online auctions. 

As you visit the collection, an amazing discovery looms large. Leonardo believed that painting sacred mysteries could itself bring the divine into the world, creating a faithful reverberation of the mystery of the Incarnation.  Two paintings in particular are as awe-inspiring and ineffable as Mozart’s Requiem.

The Salvator Mundi was inspired by the legend of Veronica’s Veil, the legendary cloth that bore the miraculous imprint of Christ’s face as he proceeded staggered on the Via Dolorosa to his Passion. In the Salvator Mundi, Christ’s face is painted in a kind of holy, liminal mist as though he were emerging from, and returning back into, another dimension.  He holds in his hand a rock crystal globe – an object of such purity and perfection that the high Middle Ages saw this as mysteriously endowed with divine luminance.  The painting plunges us into the divine presence.  It is not “about” its subject matter.  It is in it.  To stand in front of it with unblinking eyes is a powerful experience.

The exhibit also includes two different paintings of the same subject: Virgin of the Rocks.  For the first time in history, both paintings are on view in the same room and it is fascinating to see the genius of Leonardo in its restless exploration.  The paintings were commissioned by the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception.  Mary was conceived as the perfect woman pre-ordained in human history and emerging from the mysterious depths of the original creation of the Universe.  Leonardo decided to show that.  His backgrounds immediately reminded me of sci-fi artists’ conceptions of alien worlds or the Earth in its primeval years.  To stand in front of the painting is to contemplate the opening of a wormhole in time back to origins of the cosmos.

No other painter would again mix theology and metaphysics with this peculiar genius to produce such unforgettable images – imprints of the most challenging mysteries of the unfolding Western imagination.

So what does this mean for those of spending their adult years trying to help brands become culturally iconic?  Raise your sights.  Become passionate about your subject matter.  Never give up questing.  Do not mistake simplicity of expression for superficiality of thinking.  

Grazie per questa ispirazione Caro Maestro.