Iconography and its models (liturgical, artistic, spiritual, mystical) in the light of ontological theo-anthropology

The article discusses iconography as a phenomenon of theo-anthropology. The general aim of theseanaly ses is to explain the essence of iconography from the perspective of ontological anthropology – by relating it to the human existence in terms of the possibility and duty of being oneself. In this article, we consider the hypothesis according to which icon-writing has four main complementary formulations: liturgical (icon-writing as a liturgical process), artistic (icon-writing as God’s art), spiritual (icon-writing as spirituality), mystical (icon-writing as prayer). Confirming the truth of the hypothesis constitutes our main goal. We are heading towards it through the implementation of two main research tasks. In the first of them, we demonstrate that each of the assumed models of iconography contains four components (liturgical, artistic, spiritual, mystical), but in each model only one of them dominates, and it is from its perspective that the others are understood. In the second task, we show that each of these models is based on a different onto-anthropological principle – one of the four main ones (community, reflexivity, ethics, religiosity) – corresponding to one of the dimensions of the human existence in ontological terms, the concept of which we adopt for the purposes of this article. A given anthropological principle determines which of the elements of iconography dominates, i.e. what it is above all.