Florensky, Fabergé, and the Sacred Power of Being Seen

What if the world is looking at you all the time?

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When visiting a Fabergé exhibition in Houston last May and gazing at the endless rows of gilded, jewel-encrusted Easter eggs—gifts of Russian emperors to their wives—I found myself wondering: “How did they get a hold of all these precious things?”

After the revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks needed money—badly. So they began selling off Russia’s cultural treasures. Ancient icons, paintings, jewels, and imperial heirlooms—including the famous Fabergé eggs—were cataloged, crated, and shipped abroad.

Pavel Florensky, a Russian orthodox priest, who refused to collaborate with the new regime, was deeply concerned when the Bolsheviks began scrutinizing Andrei Rublev’s icon Trinity in the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. What if they sell it off too?

To prevent this, Florensky devised a clever strategy: he wrote an article on reverse perspective—to persuade the Bolsheviks of the immense cultural and spiritual value of medieval iconography.

Atheistic historians of the time held to an evolutionary view of history, believing that art and culture always progressed from the simple to the complex. As a result, they dismissed medieval icons as naïve or primitive, largely because of their use of reverse perspective, which defied the rules of Renaissance realism.

In linear perspective, all lines converge in a point behind the painting. In reverse perspective, all lines converge in a point in front of the painting—within the viewer. Most Soviet-era historians believed that, up until the Renaissance, people were unaware of the laws of linear perspective—that’s why Medieval art resembles children’s drawings.

However, this assumption was challenged by the fact that many ancient Greek and Roman paintings employed linear perspective. Though not as mathematically precise as Renaissance art, the understanding of linear perspective was clearly present. Medieval iconographers were not ignorant of linear perspective—they chose to depart from it deliberately. Why? Florensky answers:

“Space, understood as the dwelling place of God, is represented in the icon as different from physical space… Reverse perspective reveals iconic vision: it is not the person, not the viewer who enters the image, but rather the image of the world itself unfolds towards them, towards the image of the viewer, who is the image of God. Therefore, the perspectives in icons move not from the person, but towards the person...”

To put it simply: in linear perspective, I look at the world. In reverse perspective, the world looks at me. In linear perspective, I observe the world from the outside; in reverse perspective, the world enters into me. In linear perspective, I am the one looking. In reverse perspective, everything is looking at me. I feel that I am in the center.

According to Pavel Florensky, the point of spiritual art is to depict a spiritual space in which the world is turned toward the viewer. In Psalm 8, David makes a similar point,

“What is man that You think of him, and a son of man that You are concerned about him? Yet You have made him a little lower than God, and You crown him with glory and majesty!”

The universe, with all its distant stars and galaxies, looks at me. They are near me because they are made for me. This is exactly how a loved child feels—at the center. They are being looked at. The sensation of being looked at is one of the deepest longings of the human heart.

Spiritual art preserves this “childlike” perspective—a view in which we remain seen, known, and beloved. The essential thing is to feel loved at all times. I can only enter the world if the world has first entered into me. I can only feel at home in it after I have experienced it as turned toward me.

Shift the child from the center to the periphery, and they will cease to develop as they should. They will no longer see the world as turned toward them. That’s why children instinctively reverse perspective in their drawings. When they are looked at, they feel loved. In a child’s world, all lines naturally converge within them.

In contrast to Renaissance art, icons depict spiritual realism—to be real means to experience being looked at. If I look at a tree without the awareness that the tree is looking at me, I don’t yet see the tree. I see an illusion. To see reality as it is, is to experience the gaze of reality itself.

Apparently, Florensky’s clever “scheme” successfully reversed the Bolsheviks’ perspective—Rublev’s Trinity is still in Russia.