One of the first and most outstanding artists of the era of the dawn of icon painting in Russia was Theophanes the Greek. At the end of the 14th century, already an established master at the age of 35-40 years, he arrived in Russia, by this time he had painted more than a dozen churches in the cities of Constantinople, Chalcedon and Galata.
From Byzantium, the artist went first to Kafa, and then to Novgorod the Great, where he took part in the painting of the Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior.
Speaking about his, without any exaggeration, brilliant creations, we will necessarily turn to one of the main ideas of Orthodox theology - the doctrine of Light. Indeed, according to the Niceo-Constantinople Creed, the entire Orthodox world confesses Christ as "Light from Light, true God from true God."
The manifestation of this Light, called in the Christian tradition the Uncreated or Tabor Light, is described in all synoptic Gospels. Following the Athonite elders, the ascetics of the Russian Orthodox Church tirelessly proclaimed that the light of Tabor was not a temporary, passing phenomenon, but the Divine reality that already here on earth becomes a reality for the greatest saints and prayer books, crowning their ascetic feat with the Light of Transfiguration.
In this regard, special attention should be paid to the pictorial language of the author. In his work on the frescoes, Theophanes uses only two paints - ocher and whitewash. This choice of palette has surprised and baffled researchers for many years; various assumptions have been made about the reasons why the painting could be discolored.
But as it turned out later, the paint layer was not damaged, and fully corresponded to the original intention of the artist. From this circumstance, we can conclude that this style of painting was not chosen by chance and is a kind of metaphor, the symbolic meaning of which must be sought in the field of the Christian idea of the Light.
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Irina Yazykova, an outstanding specialist in the field of Christian culture, writes in her book Theology of the Icon: “The face is the focus of light, and the eyes are on the face. Light can flow from the eyes, flooding the entire face of the saint with light, as was customary in Byzantine and Russian icons of the 14th century, or glide with sharp lightning beams, like sparks flashing from the eyes, as the Novgorod and Pskov masters liked to depict, or it can be like an avalanche pour out on the face, hands, clothes, any surface, as we see in the images of Theophanes the Greek or Cyrus Emmanuel Eugenicus. Be that as it may - the light is the “main character” of the icon, the pulsation of Light is the life of the icon. The icon “dies” when the concept of inner Light disappears and it is replaced by the usual pictorial chiaroscuro”.