Monday 3 March 2014

Holy Wisdom and Winged Gods

The orthodox church has an interesting iconography for Holy Wisdom showing her as a winged woman. However before I show you a couple of icons I want you to consider this: where do the images of angles as winged humanoids derive from?

Yes near eastern art was one source but I wonder if another was early Christian artists seeing images in Greek and Roman art of winged deities like Iris or Eros?

Here's Eros in flight


and here's Thanatos Death with wings


Finally Iris messenger of the gods




Now Holy Wisdom 



Remember the first missionaries to pagan KIEV were GREEK Orthodox from Byzantium.





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