On the other hand, much in the early renaissance European art has a spiritual rather than purely aesthetic connection to Byzantine iconography, and the connection holds even when the technique is distinctly Western.
Here is a curious example of such interpenetration
Annunciation Triptych
Robert Campin
1425
This is a charming, masterfully done composition. I don't need to point out the many ways in which this is not an icon nor is intended to be: the artist's interest is in place the scene in contemporary to him setting and allow the viewer to link his own life as a tradesman to the blessed event. But Campin does not try to force any innovation: the central composition is quite canonical, and the intention is to encourage pious meditation, much like an icon would do.
Let us have a mental experiment. Replace the naturalistic oil-on-wood technique with tempera on gesso. Would that make it an icon? Still not: the image is still overloaded with unnecessary from the iconographic standpoint detail. Let us remove the distractions: the cityscape seen through st. Joseph's window, all the pots and tools and furniture. Let us retain the outline of the house, the central table with the vase, and give Joseph just one tool, which is in his hands. This begins to resemble an icon of the Annunciation with side scenes.
Let us pursue our goal, to make an icon out of this further. The donors on the left are a distraction altogether, no matter how you paint them. Perhaps, if we want to stick with the multipart composition, an image of Zacharia and expectant Elizabeth would be more apporpriate. A few things are still out of proportion to our spiritual eye. Why is the table so large? It is a naturalistic detail: people's kitchens have large tables. But its only purpose here is to contain the lily and the book -- which in themselves are important elements symbolically. So let us reduce the table to a little one-legged stand. This gives us room to make the main character figures larger relative to the less important Joseph and others. What we dioscovered is the principle of psychological perspective: things are shown large or small depending on their importance rather than actual size.
But where is the miracle? We see a young man (with inobtrusive wings) pleading with the maiden, who appears to ignore him while reading the book. We are still not showing what is the most important, the life of the spirit. Our painting remains grounded in the physical world. Now we see the reason for the nimbi and the heavenly vault: they explain what the physical objects cannot. So let us add them. Now we have very nearly a canonical icon (the redheadedness of Our Lady and her concentration on the reading remains a problem, though: an icon is supposed to retain the historically known to us facial features of major saints, and at the very least, their Jewish ethnicity).
This is what is ironic here: after all the compositional changes the tempera on gesso technique, -- the first step we took -- is really the least important. What is important it to see things not like the physical eye sees it but how the informed mind sees it. We removed the distractions and magnified the spiritual. But, of course, we have gone completely against the artist's original intent of placing the scene in a pedestrian contemporary setting.