he production of a single icon. Style motifs--e.g., composition, importation of color, hair and beard fashions, and gestures of the figures--are fixed in painting books that contain the canons of the different monastic schools of icon painters.In the Western theology of icons, the authority of the two-dimensionally of church art also was abandoned. Alongside church pictorial painting, ecclesiastical plastic arts developed; even painting in the three dimensional form was introduced through the means of perspective. Art became embedded in the entire life of personal religiosity. The holy image became the devotional image; the worshipper placed himself before an image and became engrossed in his meditation of the mysteries of the Christian revelation. As devotional images, the images became the focal points for contemplation and mystical representation. Conversely, the mystical vision itself worked its way back again into pictorial art, in that what was held in the vision was reproduced in church art. The burden of ecclesiastical tradition, which weighs heavily upon Byzantine art, has been gradually abolished in the Western Church. Religious art in the west adjusts itself at any given time to the total disposition of the church and also to the specific needs. Art in the west has also been shaped by the imaginative fantasy of the individual artist, therefore, the church of the west is much more individualized thereby allowing for an adaptable development of ecclesiastical art....
