Recently, two new icons have been added to the sanctuary of St. Vartan Cathedral, depicting the cathedral’s namesake and his martyred daughter, consecrated by Bishop Mesrop Parsamyan on the occasion of the Feast of Sts. Vartanantz on February 27th.
Armenian artist M. Hovanessian painted his subjects, Saints Vartan and Shushanik, with great skill, and in heroic scale: each canvass measures over eight feet in height.
But they were also painted in accordance with age-old Christian traditions governing how to portray saintly subjects, to make them suitable for veneration.
Below, Zohrab Center Director Dr. Jesse Arlen offers reflections on the two icons.
Unlike realist paintings or photographs, holy icons do not attempt to depict events as they happened in a single moment of historical time. Rather, icons invite those who behold them to contemplate the meaning of events from a heavenly, divine perspective.
One encounters little historical detail in the two new icons of St. Vartan and St. Shushanik that adorn the entrance of St. Vartan Cathedral in New York City. Absent from the icon of St. Vartan are scenes of battle and bloodshed, like we find in various medieval manuscript illuminations, or modern paintings depicting St. Vartan and the Battle of Avarayr.
Absent from the icon of St. Shushanik are the gruesome tortures inflicted on the holy woman’s saintly body, which fill the pages of the Armenian and Georgian martyrologies of the saint.
What are we beholding, then, when we gaze at the icons of these two saints? Icons are famously described as “windows into heaven” or “sacred windows.” But what does that mean?
Heaven signifies the meaning of things: it is the invisible realm of reality, and we gain access to that realm through symbols. The icon is a kind of tutor, telling us of the reality behind and beyond what our physical eye can see. Icons reveal the truth—but not historical truth. It is truth of another dimension: invisible, spiritual reality, not perceivable to our physical eyes. Hence, the need for the icon, which gives us a view into heavenly reality.
In earthly, historical time, Vartan Mamikonian died in battle with other Armenian nobles. In the icon, he stands victorious, holding not a spear but a processional cross, standing at the front of what one may imagine to be a long line of heroic saints behind him.
Sheathed is his sword; removed his helmet. For we see Vartan not as he stood on earth, but as he stands in Heaven—where, the prophet says, “Swords are beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not take up sword against nation, and no more shall they learn to wage war” (Isaiah 2:4).
The saint stands atop a high place, with more of the heavens visible behind him than the earth below his feet. His cloak and the plume of his helmet are red: the color associated, in memory and symbol, with the blood he shed as a witness to His Lord, in defense of the Christian faith.
Denying himself, Vartan took up the cross he holds high with his right hand, and followed after Christ. In so doing, for the sake of Christ, he lost his life and lost the world—but gained his soul and was rewarded with eternal life (Matthew 16:24–25).
In a similar place stands St. Shushanik, daughter of St. Vartan and descendant of St. Gregory the Illuminator. Around her are white lilies, the flower after which she is named: “I am a lily (shushan) of the valleys” (Song of Songs 2:1). Like the Illuminator before her, in historical time she endured years of physical torture, beatings, and imprisonment—not at the hands of enemies but by the hand and command of her own husband, Vazgen, the apostate margrave of Georgia.
Yet in the icon, we behold not a disfigured, broken body, but the immaculate body of a saintly woman. We see Shushanik as she is in heaven, where God has healed her broken heart and bound up all her wounds (Psalm 146/147:3). Lying at her feet are the unbound iron shackles with which she was once fettered in an earthly prison. But God saved her from darkness and the shadow of death, and broke away her chains (Psalm 106/107:14).
In her hand, she holds a sacred book. As we read in the historian Ukhtanes, during her tortures, “she had with her a small book, with which she performed her devotions and psalmody.” Now she stands in heaven, holding in one hand the cross and in her other the sacred Gospel, for which she endured torture, after the pattern of her ancestor St. Gregory and her Lord Jesus Christ.
She stands regally in noble raiment, crowned with the imperishable crown (1 Cor. 9:25). Behind her silent visage, it is as if we can hear her speaking the words of the prophet silently to herself, that she “has been clothed in a garment of salvation and a cloak of joy. Like a bridegroom he put a crown on my head and like a bride he adorned me with jewels” (Isaiah 61:10).
