[jocon307]

“Because both statues and paintings are artistic renderings of the image of Jesus ...

there is essentially no difference between them.”

But is not a statue a “graven” image, whereas a painting is not?

This is why the Orthodox have those great Icons (that’s what they are called, isn’t it?) - mosaic or other flat images of Saints, Jesus, etc.

Oh please, nobody yell at me, I am not equating Saints with Jesus, just trying to give examples.

[Mrs. Don-o]

For sure, every coin is a graven image.

Is coinage banned? (I'm being silly.)

But --- hmm, "graven" --- is there a difference whether a statue is literally carved in stone or wood, shaped and molded from clay or wax or some other soft modeling material, bronze-cast, porcelain-cast, plaster-cast? What if it's welded?

For that matter, what if it's made of pixels?

Interestingly, I don't know of any Christian group that objects to statuary in cemeteries.

But I could be wrong. What do I know?

The important thing is that "things" are not God or "gods" to us, and that in all things, may God be glorified. .

[af_vet_1981]

But is not a statue a “graven” image, whereas a painting is not?

תְּמוּנָ֡֔ה is the other word in the Exodus prohibition (likeness, form, ie., picture).

For a great many people the Icon is the supreme symbol of the Orthodox Church. This has been especially true on the popular level since the western world was flooded by Russian émigrés and religious artifacts following World War I. Shortly thereafter the revival in Byzantine studies gained impetus and icons were studied on a serious level while the antique shops offered examples of everything from rare ancient specimens to the great liquid-eyed 19th century romantic western imitations that in the eighteenth century had supplanted the traditional types in the Orthodox lands.

For many westerners, and in the Orthodox folklore, icons are the Eastern substitute for statues commonly, and erroneously, believed to the forbidden in the Orthodox Church. Actually, statues are by no means forbidden in Orthodoxy and were always a regular part of the decorative and devotional furnishing of the sacred space, the church interior.

Icon, now commonly used as a technical term for the flat, perspective less devotional pictures of oriental Orthodoxy is simply the Greek word for “image.” The Ecumenical Counciliar dogmatic decrees on icons refer, in fact, to all religious images including three-dimensional statues.

Professor Sergios Verkhovskoi, the conservative professor of dogmatics at St. Vladimir’s Seminary forthrightly condemns as heretical anyone who declares statues as unOrthodox or in any way canonically inferior to paintings. (By the 19th Century the traditional flat paintings, derived from Hellenistic Egyptian funerary portraits, and currently claimed to be “authentic” icons had been supplanted throughout the Orthodox Church by western naturalistic painting, more or less skilled.)

How, then, did the common opinion arise that statues were “western,” “heterodox,” “heretical”? The answer is quite simple and derived from sound cultural and sociological foundations.

Statues were common in Byzantium. Our title picture illustrates an ivory, three-dimensional statuette, of the Virgin and Child, “Hodegetria,” from 10th Century Constantinople. Now in the Victoria and Albert museum, it differs from similar examples in Hamburg and New York, in that it was not cut out of an ivory tablet. The back is as carefully and skillfully carved as the front.