icon

icon [Gr. eikon=image], single image created as a focal point of religious veneration, especially a painted or carved portable object of the Orthodox Eastern faith. Icons commonly represent Christ Pantocrator, the Virgin as Queen of the Heavens, or, less frequently, the saints; since the 6th cent. they have been considered an aid to the devotee in making his prayers heard by the holy figure represented in the icon. The icon grew out of the mosaic and fresco tradition of early Byzantine art (see Byzantine art and architecture). It was used to decorate the wall and floor surfaces of churches, baptisteries, and sepulchers, and later was carried on standards in time of war and in religious processions. Although the art form was in common use by the end of the 5th cent., early monuments have been lost, largely because of their destruction during the iconoclastic controversy (726–843; see iconoclasm). Little has survived that was created before the 10th cent. Byzantine icons were produced in great numbers until 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire. The practice was transplanted to Russia, where icons were made until the Revolution (see Russian art and architecture). The anonymous artists of the Orthodox Eastern faith were concerned not with the conquest of space and movement as seen in the development of Western painting but instead with the portrayal of the symbolic or mystical aspects of the divine being. The stiff and conventionalized appearance of icons may bear some relationship to the two-dimensional, ornamental quality of the Eastern tradition. It is this effect more than any other that causes the icons in Byzantine and later in Russian and Greek Orthodox art to appear unchanging through the centuries; there is, however, a stylistic evolution in Byzanto-Russian art that can be seen through variations of a standard theme by local schools rather than through the development of an art style by periods. The term icon came to mean "subject matter" in the 19th-century German school of art historical study, and from this meaning were derived the terms iconography and iconology.

Bibliography

See A. Schröder, Introduction to Icons (tr. 1967); K. Weitzmann et al., ed., A Treasure of Icons (tr. 1968); H. Skrobucha, The World of Icons (tr. 1971); D. and T. T. Rice, Icons and Their History (1974).

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icon

“Annunciation,” reverse of a double-sided painted panel icon from Constantinople, early …

(credit: Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munchen)

In Eastern Orthodoxy, the representation of sacred persons or events in murals, mosaics, or paintings on wood. After the Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8th–9th century, which disputed the religious function and meaning of icons (see iconoclasm), the Eastern churches formulated an official doctrine that approved their use, stating that since God had assumed material form in the person of Jesus, he and other sacred personages could be represented in works of art. Usually depicting Jesus or Mary but also sometimes saints, icons are relied on as objects of veneration and as tools for instruction.

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In a graphical user interface (GUI), a small, pictorial, on-screen representation of an object, such as a document, program, folder or disk drive.

Icons on the Desktop

This Windows desktop shows icons of files, folders, programs and other resources. Icons are everywhere these days.

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1.	(language)	Icon - A descendant of SNOBOL4 with Pascal-like syntax, produced by Griswold in the 1970's. Icon is a general-purpose language with special features for string scanning. It has dynamic types: records, sets, lists, strings, tables. If has some object oriented features but no modules or exceptions. It has a primitive Unix interface. The central theme of Icon is the generator: when an expression is evaluated it may be suspended and later resumed, producing a result sequence of values until it fails. Resumption takes place implicitly in two contexts: iteration which is syntactically loop-like ('every-do'), and goal-directed evaluation in which a conditional expression automatically attempts to produce at least one result. Expressions that fail are used in lieu of Booleans. Data backtracking is supported by a reversible assignment. Icon also has co-expressions, which can be explicitly resumed at any time. Version 8.8 by Ralph Griswold <ralph@cs.arizona.edu> includes an interpreter, a compiler (for some platforms) and a library (v8.8). Icon has been ported to Amiga, Atari, CMS, Macintosh, Macintosh/MPW, MS-DOS, MVS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Acorn. See also Ibpag2. ftp://cs.arizona.edu/icon/, MS-DOS FTP. Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.lang.icon. E-mail: <icon-project@cs.arizona.edu>, <mengarini@delphi.com>. Mailing list: icon-group@arizona.edu. ["The Icon Programmming Language", Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold, Prentice Hall, seond edition, 1990]. ["The Implementation of the Icon Programmming Language", Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold, Princeton University Press 1986].
2.	(graphics)	icon - A small picture intended to represent something (a file, directory, or action) in a graphical user interface. When an icon is clicked on, some action is performed such as opening a directory or aborting a file transfer. Icons are usually stored as bitmap images. Microsoft Windows uses a special bitmap format with file name extension ".ico" as well as embedding icons in executable (".exe") and Dynamically Linked Library (DLL) files. The term originates from Alan Kay's theory for designing interfaces which was primarily based on the work of Jerome Bruner. Bruner's second developmental stage, iconic, uses a system of representation that depends on visual or other sensory organization and upon the use of summarising images. IEEE publication.