The Iconostasis's Development From Low Screen To Full Wall

The iconostasis did not begin as the tall, solid wall familiar in Orthodox churches today; earlier Byzantine churches used a low barrier called a templon, often little more than a waist-high or chest-high colonnaded screen hung with a limited number of icons and curtains, which still allowed the congregation a fairly direct view into the sanctuary during the liturgy. Over the course of the middle and late Byzantine periods, and especially in the Russian Orthodox tradition from around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries onward, this low templon was progressively built up, tier by tier, with additional rows of icons until it became the essentially solid, fully enclosing wall now standard across most Orthodox churches, a development art historians associate partly with an increasing theological and devotional emphasis on the icon itself as a primary vehicle of sacred presence within the church.

Because the fully developed iconostasis is a comparatively late refinement of what began as a much more open screen, its degree of solidity and height still varies somewhat by regional tradition and period, with some Greek and other Orthodox churches retaining a lower, more open iconostasis closer to the earlier templon form even as the tall Russian-style wall became the form most widely recognized internationally as characteristic of Orthodox church architecture.