On the Treshold

Whether it is the sum or the lack of mastery, at its basis lies the authentic perception of an unearthly spiritual experience." The world of icon painting, which Florenskij reveals to us in his essay, would forever remain incomprehensible if approached with the usual tools of art criticism. Exempt from perspective, incompatible with the conception of dominant painting in the West, from the Renaissance onwards, the icon transcends space and time. Florenskij introduces us to metaphysics with very acute historical analyzes, ranging from Flemish painting to the techniques of colour preparation, from the geometry of drapery to the transfiguring force, a seventeenth-century painting by Italian painter Amedeo Perugino, exhibited in Gozo's Ta 'Pinu Sanctuary, in Malta, is considered as a miraculous western icon, and was made accessible to people living with vision loss, thanks to Father Gerard Buhagiar, with the same precautions as a Greek Orthodox icon.

Iconographically, the works of art, considered as finding its roots in thaumaturgy, depicts a Vergine Assunta who, in 1883, is said to have miraculously spoken to pilgrims, a sign of graces received. The perspective bas relief was done in the tactile museum Anteros. The prototype was modelled in clay, creating contours and volumes as perceived in the painting, and translatable into touch for the understanding of the functional shape by people living with vision loss. The plastic translation of the painting was presented at the Ta 'Pinu Sanctuary on the morning of November 30^th, in the presence of the Bishop of Gozo, as part of a moving ceremony strong in intensity and truth of faith. The image in relief, as a reflection of the thaumaturgical work, was blessed and carried in procession inside the Sanctuary's presbytery, to be touched by some blind worshippers. In this case, the ideal cultural nature of the theological icon, merging with its devotional function, has allowed us to see the idea in an essence rendered as a perceptible substance. What stirred sincere emotions was to perceive how a mystical content could translate itself into the physical nature of the image and return as a pure idea, in the mind of blind worshippers who have the advantage of understanding the depth, transcendence and subtlety of the world of symbolic images.