Another type of icon that fits into this category is icons of God the Father. It fits into the realm of the dogmatic icon, and yet it is not canonically an icon. It is an image of Christ shown as an angel. For example, there is an icon of Christ the Blessed Silence. Over time, icons have been produced that do not conform to the canon of iconography. Again, I will blame print media (just because it is printed in a book of icons does not mean it is a canonical icon), and those iconographers who have gone before us who may have been more concerned with being artists than iconographers. As was pointed out to me by Bishop Arseni of Joensuu, checklist points one to eight are tangible: one can usually show on the panel itself what it is that prevents the icon from being blessed.
The last point is one that is hard to explain. This is not to say that we cannot have devotion to these saints, or even sacred images of them, but what it does say is that these icons should not be blessed on our altars. The date 1054 AD is our cut off mark for sharing saints with the Roman Catholic Church, or among some historians, 1204 AD (the Fourth Crusade), or even 1453 AD (the fall of Constantinople) Whatever the date cited as the official one for the schism between East and West, those dates need to be respected, no matter how fond we are of various holy people of other traditions. Even if an image is done in a Byzantine iconographic style, this does not mean that it is an icon that is blessable on an Orthodox altar. There is also a great danger in using the internet if you are looking for proper models, because some who call themselves iconographers have painted, in iconographic styles, saints of all different faiths, and even people that no church has recognised as saints. Unfortunately, not all of the saints represented are Orthodox Saints. And many people bring them to Orthodox churches to have them blessed. So many people today, of different faiths, paint icons. In the context of the life icon, they are perfectly acceptable, but taken out of context, they cannot be considered icons.
The same is true for life icons: when we have reproductions of the life of a saint, say, for example, the familiar icon of St Herman of Alaska and the details of his life, if we take one part of that life icon, for example, St Herman’s stopping the tidal wave, or his body’s being taken from Spruce Island on a helicopter, those details cannot stand by themselves as icons. A detail cannot be considered an icon, just as a photograph of a left eye cannot be considered a portrait of a person. Unfortunately, this sometimes happens: either iconographers paint, or those who make print icons print, only details of icons and not the whole thing. I can take a book down and look at all the photographs and details of photographs of icons, and if I am not careful, I can mistake a detail for an appropriate model to paint. I have many, many books on icons, from many different places in the world. It is marvelous that we live in a society and a culture where we have so much print media available to us.
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