Here in sec6 (www.jbburnett.com/yannaras/yannaras-art.html#sec6) we read,

quote:

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"It is certainly through Greek tradition and technique that the Byzantine iconographer reaches the point of transcending the individual and incidental characteristics of the person or object depicted. This transcendence, however, does not aim to manifest the idea of the entity, to reduce the actual existent object to an ideal "universal." For the Byzantine iconographer, the only existential reality beyond corruption and death is the person, the dynamic transcendence of individuality which constitutes a transformation in the mode of existence. It is no longer a matter of reducing the concrete to the abstract universality of an idea which is a 'metaphysical' datum, accessible to the intellect alone. At issue is the potential existing in concrete reality, in man's individual flesh and the flesh of the world, to participate in the true life of personal distinctiveness, of freedom from any natural predetermination. In the icon, the iconographer sets out the personal mode of existence which is love, communion and relationship, the only mode which forms existential distinctiveness and freedom into a fact of life and a hypostasis of life."

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