Influencia del icono oriental en el arte sacro contemporáneo: la obra de Rupnik y Argüello en la catedral de La Almudena de Madrid

Abstract

The world of contemporary sacred art has experienced in recent decades a return to figuration linked to the rediscovery of icons. Different authors have turned to the Eastern tradition to retake a path of the sacred image that in the Church of the West had already been lost for the sake of a certain iconoclasm especially present in the central decades of the 20th century.
Overcoming these moments of crisis of the sacred image, especially linked to the Liturgical Movement and its architectural expression through German functionalism, a determined attitude of recovery of the icon is observed as a category especially conducive to the creation of sacred and liturgical art, also rediscovering itself, in a more theoretical sphere, the theology associated with these plastic expressions. For this reason, we have discovered over the last decades a recovery of the icon that extends beyond the limits of the Orthodox world, creating paths of reciprocal influences between East and West.
In this paper, the influence of the oriental icon in contemporary sacred art will be analyzed through the study of the contributions that Kiko Argüello and Marko Ivan Rupnik have made in the Cathedral of La Almudena in Madrid between 2004 and 2011. The comparative study of different Iconographies will allow us to appreciate the assumption and reinterpretation of eastern models as a vehicle for the renewal of western sacred art.