Item 1692 - Seeing Christ: a meditation on Andrew Rublev's Saviour of Zvenigorod

0.1 cm of textual records

This item is two copies of a 4 page article by Henri Nouwen entitled,’ Seeing Christ: A meditation on Andrew Rublev’s Savior of Zvenigorod’, published in America, Vol. 154, No. 1, January 4 – 11, 1986, pp. 4 – 7. Nouwen begins this meditation on the icon by stating, ‘To see Christ is to see God and all of humanity. This mystery has evoked in me a burning desire to see the face of Jesus’. Nouwen then relates this to his love of the face of Christ as portrayed by Rublev in this icon. Nouwen begins by describing the damage to this 15thC image and then describes what he sees as a ‘tender human face’ and the colors ‘of inexpressible beauty’ which are used. The next focus for Nouwen are the eyes of Christ: ‘Their gaze is so mysterious and deep that any word that tries to describe them is inadequate’. Nouwen concludes the meditation by stating, ‘Seeing the Christ by Rublev is a profound event…seeing Christ leads us to the heart of God as well as to the heart of all that is human’. In an Afterword, Nouwen discusses the icon painting tradition and notes that beginning in the 6th C. there is a tendency to portray the face of Christ in a similar way in all icons and in a way which may be related to the face on the Shroud of Turin which may have been the actual face of Christ.

Published in America 154, no. 1 (January 4-11, 1986): 4-7.
This item is published in Nouwen, Henri: Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN., 1987.

Added by L Joson, 10 November 2017
Revised by L Joson, 22 June 2018
Revised by T Wong, 13 October 2021