Christian Revelation in the Photographic Arts: Urban Warfare, Light as a Borrowed Metaphor, and Roman Bordun’s The Apartment After the Artillery Bombardment in Ukraine

Abstract

Roman Bordun’s twenty-first century photograph The Apartment After the Artillery Bombardment. Heat resistant Ceramic Vase. Irpin [Ukraine]. June 2022 uses light to express the Christian paradox of suffering that leads to redemption and eternal life for the just. In order to imbue spiritual meaning into a photographic work, Bordun draws from Renaissance artists in his use of technique (chiaroscuro), topic (warfare), and geography (the city) that all reference Christ’s Resurrection. Comparing and contrasting Bordun’s Apartment with Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino’s [Raphael] paint on wood Saint Michael Overwhelming the Demon (c. 1505) demonstrates how Bordun’s photograph can transcend its discrete historical context, merging the factual and the mythic as described by C. S. Lewis. Through his references to Raphael and the masters, Bordun lays claim to a Christian iconography and challenges the political use of religion in waging human warfare. His works all demonstrate contemporary or even quotidian plays on Renaissance works in order to address current political issues. The art of photography and stylistic references to churches’ involvement in politics, as opposed to Christian teachings, critiques Moscow’s “post-truth” justifications of the Ukrainian invasion and war.

Roman Bordun’s twenty-first-century photograph The Apartment After the Artillery Bombardment. Heat resistant Ceramic Vase. Irpin [Ukraine]. June 2022 (Figure 1) expresses the Christian paradox of redemption achieved through suffering. The photographic arts, in contrast to painting, demand or imply a fealty to “truth”. Through the use of the photograph, Bordun challenges the manipulation of “truth” in a postmodern world that either denies its existence or perverts it through institutions to justify warfare. In order to infuse spiritual meaning into his work, Bordun draws from Renaissance artists in his use of a technique (chiaroscuro), a topic (warfare), and a specific geography (the city) that reference Christ’s Resurrection (see Appendix A). Comparing and contrasting Bordun’s The Apartment to Raffaello [Raphael] Sanzio da Urbino’s paint on wood Saint Michael Overwhelming the Demon (c. 1505; Figure 8) reveals how Bordun’s photograph can transcend the temporal and geographical specificity to speak to the mythic as described by C. S. Lewis. His works all demonstrate contemporary or even quotidian plays on Renaissance works in order to address current political issues. The art of photography and stylistic references to church involvement in politics, as opposed to teachings by Christ, critiques Moscow’s “post-truth” justifications of the Ukrainian invasion and war.

With The Apartment, Bordun challenges Vladimir Putin’s 2022–25 political deployment of the church and Orthodox Christianity to defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (see Appendix B). Bordun’s use of light conveys a Christian concept of redemption through suffering while being clear that redemption occurs not through “geographical” victory but via spiritual revelation (Lewis 2014, p. 58; Kochetova et al. 2024). With theologically inflected depictions of light, Bordun celebrates Christ’s Resurrection for the post-post-modern viewer who has been led by governments to privilege institutions over spiritual belief. The veracity of the photograph challenges the facticity of twenty-first-century warfare by politicians who deploy religious sentiment for political gain rather than spiritual knowledge, illuminating the individual and national possibility of spiritual triumph in the face of human evil.

1. Introduction: The Image, the War

Bordun’s The Apartment frames the inside of a destroyed apartment in Irpin after the Russian invasion in February 2022. Bombings targeted civilian homes and schools: 71% of the city was demolished (UNOSTAT 2022; Vautier and Cornet 2023). Once the Russians occupied the city, “unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence [took place] against Ukrainian civilians” (Human Rights Watch 2022). Looting and pilfering took a backseat to reports of widespread rape of young girls, women, and the elderly; sex trafficking; and “widespread and systematic torture” (United Nations News 2003). Yet the city’s resistance took international onlookers by surprise: “The civil mobilization was as effective as it was spontaneous, revealing a possible hero in everyone” (Vautier and Cornet 2023). By March, the city had been liberated, “Destroyed but Unconquered”, and Ukraine’s president named each person in the city a “Citizen Hero” (Markushyn 2023).

The unspeakable terrors perpetrated on the city had been justified by Moscow not only with geopolitical arguments about unification, but also with a religious rationale focused on the right-wing power offered by Putin to the Russian Orthodox Church since the end of the Soviet Union. With a vacuum of power at the religious-political level, Moscow began to use religiosity to create a revitalized nationalism that harkened back to a great pre-communist Russia. Over time, Putin has positioned himself as a “last defender of Christian traditional values”, passing laws against the LGBTQ community, bombing Syria to “defend Christians”, and criminalizing cultural dissent. By 2012, the Kremlin and the Patriarchy had sealed a bond, with numerous photographs of Putin and Patriarch of Moscow Kiril reinforcing the propaganda. When Putin launched the hostilities in February 2022, he cited the “religious persecution” of Russian Orthodox Christians by the Ukrainians. A month later, he claimed that the invasion would protect the Orthodox Russians from the “depraved Western world” (Stoeckl 2022; Stoeckl and Uzlaner 2022).

In Bordun’s photograph of the dwelling three months after the defeat of the Russian army, the dark, shadowed floor is littered with destroyed pots, dishes, and a Roman-style urn referencing a heroic past. There is no human figure in the photograph; only the remnants of a household remain, shattered. Above the rubble of destruction, the apartment’s window rises above the scene, glass shattered. The artist’s framing and use of diagonals through light shafts ask the spectator to look outside at the clouded-over sunlight, still-green trees, and a satellite dish, riddled with bullet holes. The light in the window, as though from above, contrasts the dark shadows on the floor, the earth, setting up an immediate contrast between the everyday (the dark) and the aspirational (the light).

However, Bordun’s use of light is not entirely representational and, in fact, also references the art history canon. The sun is hazy, immersed in clouds or the smoke of war, peeking through living trees, yet the light in the room is also coming from another direction, as though across the room from left to right. From the bottom left, a shaft of illumination projects upward to the corner of the room. In this war photo, the use of light is vital. In “Light, Vision, and Power”, historian Chris Otter encapsulates the history of light as an esthetic force writing, “Light is the basis of human sight…[Art] has a long tradition of playing with light, as both a subject and a tool, to create certain effects and elicit emotion” (Otter 2008, pp. 1–19). Bordun accesses this metaphorical power.

2. Looking to Biography: The Artist in His World

Theologians of Christian esthetics have long debated the significance of the artist’s biography. In the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari emphasized the Christian life of an artist when judging his artistry because he traced the history of art to Divine creation (Vasari 1991, p. 1). For example, Vasari deemed Raphael “Miraculous” and “a mortal god” and thus found great lessons in his work (Vasari 1991, pp. 4, 267, 306; Clay 2014). Indeed, Vasari noted that Raphael was born and died on Good Friday to buttress his argument that biography matters (Vasari 1991, pp. 306–7). Yet Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, writes, “The artist, as we have been reminded many times, does not need to be a saint; the point is rather that without art we should not fully see what sanctity is about” (Williams 2005, p. 2). For such more modern theologians, the artist is the conduit, the messenger.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Bordun worked as a design engineer for the city of Lviv’s buildings and architectural structures.1 He was born in the city in 1987 and was thus on intimate terms with its heritage, streets, rhythms, architecture, and people (“Biography: Rowan Bordun”; https://romanbordun.com/2023 (accessed on: 8 January 2025). As a central city in Ukraine for business and culture, Lviv contains buildings reflecting Renaissance, Baroque-era, neo-classicism, and Art Noveau architectural styles. The spectacular city survived both Soviet and German occupations, although it has been listed as endangered by UNESCO since 2022 because of the ongoing Russian assault (Figure 2).

With the Russian invasion, Bordun became a soldier and began publishing his diary in photographs. Although he does not write about the import of Christianity and the church in his life, for his countrymen, or in the battle, Bordun’s photos (Figure 3) include a gathering of soldiers alongside women, children, and older men at a church funeral. The central figure is a soldier holding a large wooden cross with a gold figure of Christ, under a plaque with a name of the deceased and their birth/death years, 1981–2023. The living soldier holding the monument to the dead also hangs his head, falling parallel to the Christ figure.2 Here, again, the light comes from above, if in this photo it is centered, catching the white hats of three women, while leaving the two uniformed soldiers almost functioning as a border for the mourners.

3. The Worker as an Artist, Not a Saint

As an artist, Bordun describes himself as working in the “naïve genre [to] capture zeitgeist”. Naïve art celebrates the artist as a worker; an ordinary man and woman3. The artist is known as an “outsider, folk, or self-taught”, although Bordun did have training (Brodskaïa 2000, p. 74; Risatti 2009a, p. 223). Henri Rousseau, the most well-known naïve artist, embraces unusual proportions and perspective, an illogicality of form and space, thus rejecting conventions in representation or depiction (Croatian Museum of Naïve Art 2012; Figure 4).

In this style, a strong emotive quality is privileged over depictions that demonstrate logic or reason (Croatian Museum of Naïve Art 2012).

Bordun’s foundational medium—painting—lends itself to naïve presentation, as evidenced in his work below (Figure 5), a riff on the Mona Lisa (Stabenow 1994).

Above, Bordun signals his deep understanding of the importance of art history, and references both the naïve style and the sixteenth-century masters with his use of light, texture and the ability to represent humans in moments of captured truth (Figure 5). Bordun’s Villa Otrada gives us an everyday Lisa, flattened and modernized, as compared to the starkly real sixteenth-century Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, a contemporary of Raphael. Bordun’s Lisa is sitting with the Villa Otrada background in Odessa, Ukraine, the city made famous for the film Potempkin about the brutality of political, human warfare in Russia. Her face is flattened by color, an unnatural pink, and she is smoking, drinking a martini, and smiling in front of a beach filled with men. The sixteenth-century Mona Lisa sits in front of a seaside town as well, which is also known for its strategic importance. She is known for her beauty, and the artist’s use of perspective and light makes her facial expression famously seem to change. Bordun reframes the beauty of Lisa, her eyes and mouth, in the naïve style; the childlike approach creates a political statement about beauty in the twenty-first century: a sunburned woman, a smoker, drinker, and everyday person as opposed to the Renaissance portrait of an elite, inexplicable in her serene, human beauty.

Although Bordun’s appropriation of the Mona Lisa does hint at the appropriateness of using his knowledge of the Renaissance and its painting techniques and as a justification for the comparison with Renaissance masters such as Raphael, perhaps the reference to the world-renowned iconic painting was a simple one-time statement. However, his deep knowledge of, respect for, and technical understanding of the masters is a consistent theme, with echoes throughout his work. In addition to his Lisa, Bordun references and deploys Leonardo da Vinci with Lady with an Ermine [1489], La Belle Ferronnière, or “Portrait of an Unknown Woman”, [1490], Ginevra de’ Benci [1474–1478], and Bordun interpreted the infamous and erotic Venus of Urbino or “Reclining Venus” [1532–1538] by Tiziano Vecellio, or Titian, whose “profound” use of color and light influenced artists for generations (Fossi 2000; Hale 2012). Viewing Bordun’s works side by side with their Renaissance counterparts, the inspiration is clear (Figure 6).

4. Techniques of Light

During the Renaissance, artists developed intense contrasts in light and dark, or “chiaroscuro”, which used light to draw out emotion, particularly when referencing revelation. These artists drew on the Middle Ages, when light was used as a metaphor for the divine and often connected to spiritual transformation (Preisinger 2021). The lighting created the “luminous atmosphere of Heaven” to draw out “visceral” reactions; the “aesthetic saturation” of light “catalyzed the acceptance of the scene as revelatory” (Ivanovici 2017, pp. 1–13). During the Age of Enlightenment, light played a key role in art; many Impressionists in the nineteenth century went outdoors to find inspiration from light patterns in nature. By the mid-twentieth century, the modernists sought to express universals. By fracturing perspective, a work of art could express a fundamental part of humanity shared by all (Childs 2000, p. 17; Everdell 1997). For the modernists, from architecture to poetry, the use of both natural and manipulated light became a vital tool for the expression of such universals (Asciuto 2025; Curtis 1996, p. 225; Neumann 2002, p. 54). With the development of the camera and moving pictures, the technique of using light to create emotion has also been heavily used in modern film and photography (Otter 2008).

The postmodernists in the mid-twentieth century challenged the use of artistic tropes as ways to express “universals”, “truth”, and other “grand narratives”, the very basis of Bordun’s naïve training and aspirations (Lyotard 1979; Aylesworth 2015). Any search for utopias, authenticity, and truth was considered folly, a source of irony and ridicule. While light had been used by artists from the Middle Ages to indicate the divine, renewal, hope, the promise of everlasting life, truth, and freedom, among other regenerative emotions, postmodernists argued that truth is not absolute and, thus, is not translatable across beings. The postmodern “signalled the demise of such concepts of modernity as ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’, ‘soul’, and ‘sincerity’” (Epstein 1998). Knowledge and revelation, or a recognition of truth, were contingent on historical and social contexts rather than absolutes; truth is always partial, never complete and certain. Postmodern artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol flatten and color light, treating light like perspective, an ancient relic and bid to “the real” from the old-fashioned Renaissance and claim to “Enlightenment”. In the case of Warhol’s work, white or gold light was no more revelatory than green, orange, or pink in the case of Marilyn (Figure 7). Bordun used this sense of color and light in his portraits after the Renaissance artists in which he painted the era’s iconic women, their “Marilyns”.

However, Bordun makes a leap forward into the post-postmodern with his use of photography to document the “everyday”, which, in his case, means the brutal remains of war. In a reaction against the literal flattening of a notion of non-reality, the post-postmodernists of the late-early twenty-first century have returned to a search for an art that expresses a shared human experience, some even claiming that the postmodern had “gone out of fashion” (Potter and Lopez 2005, p. 4). These post-post artists have relaunched ideas such as faith, trust, and even sincerity in their works. Critics call for a “post-Postmodernism that seeks to temper reason with faith”4 “Truth” is back in vogue. In this bid to make “truth” work for the artist, the photographic arts bring the artist back to the practical world, the world in which people inhabit.

Through visual techniques, the artist from the Middle Ages through the present accesses the gaze of the viewer to create sentiment and emotion, true or not, universal or particular. Through the artist’s use of images, transformation is experienced in the viewer, and only then can it be named as Christian or revelatory. Despite the postmodern moment, since the start of time, light, as an enduring metaphor, Christian or not, is equated with the creative power of God (Genesis 1:3–5).5 Light opens the world and demonstrates God as the creator from the first passages of the Bible. Light is experienced every day as personal [fact experienced], understood as a part of earthly and historical time [fact known], and also carries significance as mythic and God-given. Regarding religion and light, Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, “[The economy of the flesh and the cross] teach an inward and upward ascent that reaches the point where the eternal light transfigures the still veiled earthly forms of salvation” (von Balthasar [1982] 2009, pp. 39, 200). Light and its reflections are persistent metaphors for the acquisition of knowledge, transformation, and spiritual enlightenment (Pugh 2014, p. 94). I argue that light acts as a symbol, deployed or repressed. Fiddes writes, “[Paul] Tillich speaks of being ’grasped’ by a symbol, which opens up new vistas both of ultimate reality (‘the Holy’) and the human spirit”, and continues, “[Symbols] act as media of the Spiritual Presence… because they are used by the divine Spirit for a place of revelation” (Fiddes 2021, p. 25). Although the postmodernists and early historians of emotions strongly critiqued any notion of a “universality” of emotions and reactions, new work argues that historians of emotions must work alongside scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, neurologists, anthropologists, and geneticists, who understand a potential universality of emotion shared across not only humans, but species (Plamper 2015; Irish 2019; Hogan 2022, pp. 29–32; Boddice 2019, pp. 1994–97; Grubb 1997, p. 144; Frevert 2014; Masataka and Perlovsky 2012, pp. 694–744; Radenovic and Akkad 2022, pp. 96–123; Reddy 2001).

In Bordun’s “The Apartment”, he accesses the traditional paradigm of light and the shadows it creates as revelatory, and uses tropes that are derived from the traditional and the classical, while also embracing the post-postmodern in his manipulation of light in the context of a postmodern world that does not privilege truth. In the end, he returns to the post-postmodern with his use of photography and references to the Renaissance.

Raphael’s Saint Michael and the Dragon has been understood as “a notable conception of the triumph of good over evil” (Figure 8). As it was one of Raphael’s first works to address political warfare, its significance cannot be missed: also known as “The Angel of Death”, St. Michael, the only human featured, offers the souls of the newly departed an opportunity for redemption (Arnold 2013). The work has become an expression of the canon from the Book of Revelation, “from the resurrection and Last Judgment to ‘the new heaven and the new earth’” (Revelation 2: 21–22). The use of light as a trope and icon is a central part of the Book of Revelation, particularly in 1:9–20 when John sees that Christ is literally light, white, fire, bronze, shining sun—all metaphors that express the power of postwar redemption. Later, the text reads, “There will be no more night, and people will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, because the Lord God will give them light”, [22:5], and “The city has no need for the sun or moon because the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp” [21:22–27]. The painting continues to carry import as a metaphor for “a good war” (Leulliette 1964).

Figure 8. Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, St Michael and the Dragon (1503-05), Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Figure 8. Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, St Michael and the Dragon (1503-05), Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The Renaissance: Bordun’s Trope

In the painting, Michael the Archangel, whose name means “one who is like God”, led an army of angels who cast out Satan (dragon, serpent, and Devil) to Hell (Revelation 12:7–10). With Michael’s bravery in battle, “Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ” (Revelation 12:10); “Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them” (Revelation 12:12). In Raphael’s work, Michael wears leather armor, brandishes a shield, and is caught in the upward throw of the sword just before he slays the defeated animal, a symbol of Satan. Behind Michael, ghoulish figures and a decrepit city haunt the shadows. Yet from Revelations, the viewer knows that the city will be cleared because of Michael, the warrior.

In Raphael’s work, the paradox of war is that it references the possibility of redemption. The figure of Michael has won the battle: the serpent lies below him as his arm is raised to finally slay it, even if the background figures have yet to be exiled.

5. Religion and Warfare in Eastern Europe: The Ideological Battle for Hearts, Minds and Souls

In Bordun’s The Apartment, inside, everything is shattered, yet outside, the trees are green and alive, and although damaged, the satellite dish acts as a reference to Christ’s halo with its positionality set over the image, as though the setting were his head. Both Bordun and Raphael’s images show the darkness of the ground, of human scorched earth, yet provide hope with the light from above granted by spiritual truth.

In post-Cold War Ukraine, the role of the Eastern Orthodox Church has been fraught with “post” paradoxes, and stands in sharp contrast to the role of prayer, belief, and spirituality found in the individual. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, Moscow politicized church institutions for the exercise of cultural hegemony over Ukraine and the promotion of Moscow’s political agenda in the region. Particularly in Ukraine after 1941, Cold War geopolitics feature heavily in ecclesiastical history because the church “was always standing on the border between East and West, and therefore experienced numerous persecutions” (Krykunov 2020, p. 8, fn1; Magocsi 2010, p. 399). Battles over geography and geopolitics became intertwined with Cold War ideology, particularly the role of the individual, salvation, and the church’s institutional structure (Tataryn 1992, pp. 292–318; Denysenko 2018; Denysenko 2023; Clark and Vovk 2020).

In an admittedly flattened historical overview of the communist influence on the churches, between 1917 and 1991, Moscow’s anti-religious policies shifted from Lenin’s hardline assertion that religion is the “opiate of the masses”, to the strong promotion of “scientific atheism”, to Stalin’s direct use of the church to build nationalism, to semi-tolerance if concessions could be found (Miner 2003, pp. 2–3). Because of the communist mantra that an individual’s fealty must be to the state and not the church, some churches became sites of protest against the repressive Soviet empire (Smolkin 2018; Corley 1996; Brown 2019; Ramet 2005). The United States led numerous Cold War propaganda campaigns (Figure 9), begun during WWII to fight the Nazis, that stressed the import of freedom of religion in the West, and connected Western spirituality and churches to political truth (Preston 2012; Ruble 2012; Schmidt and Promey 2012; Kirby 2002; Ford 2017; Herzog 2011; Kidd 2019, pp. 207–28; Inboden 2010; Chadwick 1992). Moscow fought back (Figure 10).

In Soviet-era propaganda posters (see Figure 11), workers, the Soviet heroes, have put Christ into a wheelbarrow, and they are dumping him and his bread and wine upside down to the ground, to be buried. The caption reads, “Jesus being dumped from a wheelbarrow by an industrial worker; Industrialization Day replaces the Christian Transfiguration Day”.6 The Feast of the Transfiguration (August 6) celebrates the fact that when Jesus Christ took three disciples, Peter, James, and John, up on a mountain, Moses and Elijah appeared. Jesus was then “transfigured”, with his face altering “and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning”. (Luke 9:29–30; see also Mark 9:2–13; Matthew 17:1–13; Luke 9:28–36). This type of Soviet-era poster denouncing not only the figure of Christ, but also any religion and its relics, were commonplace.

Following 1991 and the crumbling of the USSR, religion came to the fore for people who could, again, practice freely; yet, there existed a power vacuum between the church, once banned, and the state, once treated like the monarchy. Over time, Moscow recognized the power of religion, as did the US during the Cold War. Instead of attempting to constrain or ban religion, Moscow now embraced the church institutions and quietly detonated its religion’s persistent power over the people, many of whom were hungry for a re-established relationship with the church and particularly its romanticized connection to the glorious days of the Russian empire under the czar, a nostalgia that Moscow was trying to encourage and weaponize as nationalist sentiment (Kivelson and Greene 2003). Under Putin, the line between church and state became blurred, as the church could be weaponized to justify and promote Moscow’s reemergence as a player in global empire rebuilding (Blakkisrud and Kolstø 2025; Ash 2024). Yet in opposition to Putin and such narratives, in January 2019, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I granted Ukraine its own church, which ended centuries of Russian ecclesiastical authority over Ukraine. It also signaled the church’s support of the Ukraine government’s active desire to limit Moscow’s influence on its citizens, and particularly their day-to-day lives, after years of domination (Marson 2019). The paradoxical turn: during the Nazi and Soviet times, Russian and Ukrainian churches became sites of resistance to fascist oppressive doctrines; in the post-Soviet years, as Moscow came to weaponize the church for the promotion of its political agendas, Ukraine again found individual Christian spirituality at odds with Russia’s institutions, even its church.

Ukrainian artists have used Christian religious imagery to protest Moscow’s domination because Putin has embraced the Eastern Orthodox Church, with its head being called Putin’s “spiritual leader” and “The God of War”(Figure 12) (Mirovalev 2024). Using ideas such as “family values”, and other themes agreed upon with “Putin’s Useful Priests”, as noted earlier, Moscow has deployed religion to justify the invasion of Ukraine (Pullella 2022; Soldatov and Borogan 2023). In opposing Putin’s claim that the Ukrainians and Russians share common religious roots, which justifies the war that will reunite the Ukrainian people with Moscow, with Kirill at the helm, the Ukrainian belief in the power of icons takes on mythic status, with numerous people believing that, so long as St. Sophia Cathedral and the icon of Sophia are not destroyed, that Ukraine will triumph against Russia. The Virgin Mary, specifically, is often used to protest for freedom by artists (Harris 2022).

Although little information about Bordun’s religiosity is readily available, and his daily life as a soldier in a brutal war on his homeland has prevented an oral history or interview, his photographic works outside his diary also provide biographical clues about his religiosity. In Bordun’s full exhibition, “Lets Leave it for Better Times” at L’vivs’kyy Munitsypal’nyy Mystets’kyy Tsentr, his work Sanctus, hung near The Apartment, directly references Good Friday, the Eucharist, and the Resurrection through an image of Christ (Figure 13). Again, the lighting comes from the top right of the photo and points through Christ to from the heavens to illuminate earth. In this case, the first word that is the largest and most clearly written is the maritime warfare cry “SOS”: “Save our Souls”, or “Save our Ship” (Mulroy 2023).

As in the Soviet period, Bordun’s Christ figure is an act of protest through ecclesiastical art: the paradoxical irony cannot be missed.

In Bordun’s work, the recurrence of Christian themes in the diary and exhibit, particularly the use of icons, demonstrates his intention to access Christian theology to move his audience through their experiential gaze, as distinct from the politics of the Moscow-led church as an institution, which is demonstrated by a Christian theological analysis of the artist’s photography (see Appendix A). Through the contrast of the institutional command to create war versus the spiritual light that asks us to end war and grant freedom, Bordun sends a strong message of wartime protest through the use of light as a religious symbol with meaning that transcends ages.

6. Warfare in the City: Drawing on Renaissance Traditions

In Bordun’s image, he accesses the myth portrayed by Raphael but set in Irpin—a factual location, but one that transcends into myth through the storytelling of photography.7 The destruction is real: we read about decomposing bodies in rubble, the tears of raped women and girls still walking, the population’s hunger and thirst, and the threat of nuclear annihilation plaguing the living. Yet on the one year anniversary of the Russian defeat, Le Monde’s headline read, “Irpin…A City Symbolizing Ukrainian Resistance” (Vautier and Cornet 2023). A photo of the Council of Europe’s Secretary General, Marija Pejčinović Burić, showed Burić carrying a cross on his shoulder to an unmarked mound of dirt as he walked in a field of new graves marked with the Ukrainian flag draped on hundreds of wooden crosses. Shouldering a cross, he declared that Irpin “will remain forever in Europe’s collective memory” (Markushyn 2023). In the rubble, Irpin is recognized as a “City for Life”.8

In Raphael’s setting for St. Michael, the city in the background refers to Urbino (Chapman et al. 2004). Michael is known as the patron saint of urban police and soldiers, as well as a “commander of heaven’s forces” (Arnold 2013, p. 231). Raphael’s reference to Urbino brings the painted image into the realm of fact and history. In 1502, it became the site of a political battle that embroiled Pope Alexander VI, who had made fickle political alliances with Spain and France over Portugal to secure his own power. From mistresses to fiscal corruption, and despite his legacy of an enduring church Christmas ceremony and support of education and the arts, he left a sordid legacy, with his death in 1503 coinciding with Raphael’s painting (Masson and Johnson 1981). Indeed, descriptions of his body after death seem to parallel the figures in the painting: described as “deformed, blackened”, “swelled”, “covered in brown drivel”, and with an “infectious smell—”the ugliest, most monstrous, and horrible dead body that was ever seen” (Lankford 2017, p. 183; Villari 2007, p. 181). In 1503, Alexander’s successor, Julius II, announced the day after his election, “[Alexander] desecrated the Holy Church as none before. He usurped the paper power by the Devil’s aid…” (Telford 2020, p. 191). Noted by von Balthasar, “[The economy of the flesh and the cross] teach an inward and upward ascent that reaches the point where the eternal light transfigures the still veiled earthly forms of salvation (von Balthasar [1982] 2009, p. 39). Thus, Urbino is dark, still filled with evil creatures that take on mythic proportions, yet Raphael includes accurate, factual characteristics of the bodies taken by the Devil, in the moment before Michael triumphs. By 1504, Urbino had become a hub of Renaissance culture, but its political import was charged.

In the setting for St. Michael, Raphael also relied on tropes about Hell from Dante’s Inferno, thus evoking the mythic alongside the historical. Dante’s City of Dis, located in the sixth circle of Hell, is described through architectural features, such as towers and ramparts, seen in Raphael’s background cityscape. Dante’s decrepit Dis is filled with evil beings, as well as the castle and creatures in Raphael’s work. Raphael’s Urbino-Dis stands as the antithesis of St. Augustine’s City of God (Storey 2010, pp. 306–7). Augustine argues that Rome is a city of man: ephemeral, earthly, and terminal. The City of God is stable, eternal, and redemptive (Hawkins 1995; O’Donnell 1999, pp. 215–31; Kaufman [1990] 2006). Thus, the city as a human battleground, and the pictorial double reference to Dante and St. Augustine, becomes an ideal metaphor that communicates the potential for redemption.

7. Technique: Chiaroscuro, the Human Body, and Emptied Space

The lighting technique developed in the Renaissance, chiaroscuro, is derived from the Italian and means “light” (chiaro) and “dark” (scuro) (Risatti 2009b). Directional light contrasts with darkness to create volume and depth. In “Saint Michael and the Dragon”, Michael seems to emerge, resplendent, from a backdrop of darkness, although the painting also depicts light in the sky on the right. But it is earthly, dulled, and smoky (Fichner-Rathus 2011). Raphael “used light and its crisp accents to accentuate holy luminescence” (Lesso 2023; van Eikema Hommes 2000, p. 4). Raphael deploys theatrical tenebrism to spotlight the shield Michael holds. The shield’s design is hit by a beam from the left, a known directional sign indicating God’s work. The red cross on a white background signifies Christ’s suffering on the cross, and also references St. George, the military saint and crusader (Cormack and Mihalarias 1984, p. 141; Stein 2011). Jean-Luc Marion argues that the paradox of perspective, light and dark, is “a counter-appearance that offers in a spectacle to be seen the opposite of what, at first sight, one would expect to see” (Marion 2003, p. 7). In the painting, the bright light on the white metal is a “surprise” as it falls in stark contrast to the darkness of the scene, the earthly sky, and the shrouded background figures. Marion concludes, “[light] makes visible that which one … is not able to see without astonishment [stupeur]” (Marion 2003, p. 7; Hall 1994; Emison 2012, pp. 105–7). This astonishment begets revelation and the promise of redemption.

In “The Apartment”, Bordun draws on the long-established trope of light as redemptive in Christian theology and esthetics through chiaroscuro and light; yet, it is photographed in an instant. Like Raphael’s earthly sky, the light that emerges at the right of the photograph from behind the trees, dulled by clouds, establishes the daily ritual of light and dark, as well as sunrise and sunset. Drawing on the “surprise” element, a key to Raphael’s use of light to access God’s redemptive work, Bordun shows a streak of sunlight beaming from the upper left through a hole in the building. It hits a white radiator, recalling Raphael’s use of both color and light to signal redemption and the possibilities of resurrection after warfare.

While drawing on Raphael’s chiaroscuro techniques, accessing elements of paradox, light and dark, to symbolize the painful resurrection of Christ, Bordun removes the human figure from his frame, unlike both Raphael and many of Bordun’s other works in the exhibit, including the actual Christ figure in “Sanctus”. The power of The Apartment lies in the paradox of this removal of the human form, implicit in Christology. Marion writes of Christian art: “Briefly: the visible humanity gives to be recognized in the person of Christ the invisible divinity”; equivalence that enables Christ to say: ‘The one who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9)” (Marion 2003, pp. 46–47). While drawing from esthetic tropes perfected by Raphael for Christian art, Bordun then reverses them to strip the space of the human body, heightening a reference to the Resurrection.

Bordun demonstrates the personal framed in the politics of warfare, the concept that within each person there is a hero, yet he takes this further to access the possibility of Christian redemption. In the work, the gaze is brought into the room, as though the viewer is coming home to the decimation: the walls drip concrete like tears, and bits of paint and plaster fill the room with dust.

8. The Artistic Labor of Photography and C.S. Lewis

“Augustine likens the principles and articles of Christian doctrine to the alphabet: they provide us with a way of speaking about God”, notes Professor R. Lamb. Photography is an oft-forgotten letter in that artistic alphabet (Marion 2003, pp. 46–47). The Apartment shows that photography is particularly effective in communicating Christian theology in the twenty-first century, a time where skepticism has become prevalent as political leaders have run fast and loose with “truth” as an intimate link between politics and religion. Von Balthasar argues, “The particular nature of one’s subject-matter must be reflected first of all in the particular nature of one’s method” (von Balthasar [1982] 2009). Warfare and its immediacy in creating human suffering is undeniable in Bordun’s photograph as document and fact. Unlike the mythic Michael, who refers to St. George and Christ, the photograph veils the Christian theological underpinnings with the immediacy of historicity and fact. It convinces: this is real (Arnold 2015, 2020; Berger 1972; Carrier 2008; Mitchell 2006).

Williams’s theology also supports the use of new artistic genres in Christian art because “the Christian theologian says that God is of his nature, ‘generative’—that the notion of a solitary or inactive deity is incompatible with what God shows of God in the world and its history” (Williams 2005). Yet with the invention of photography, critics challenged the genre as art. In 1859, Charles Baudelaire wrote that, like shorthand, photography merely had a copying function (Baudelaire 1955). The painter was being corrupted by the genre “by bowing down before external reality” (Baudelaire 1955). Although this argument seems outdated, Marion makes a similar twenty-first-century claim: “[The painter] completes the world, precisely because he does not imitate nature” (Marion 2003, p. 18).

Yet the theological work of C.S. Lewis offers an antidote to Baudelaire and Marion’s despair by offering a justification for the use of the documentary, factual form—based on historicity—as Christian. Lewis asserts, “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact”. He elaborates, “To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become).” (Lewis 2014, pp. 58–60). Fact-art can add to a Christian alphabet for the current day, which has become obsessed with the real and reality, and betrayed by Christian ethics (Bignell 2005). As demonstrated earlier, through the use of photography and geography, Bordun frames “the fact” in order to embrace the potent power of narrative and myth that is essential to Christian theological approaches to redemption.

Bordun doubles back on truth to access the mythic. Fiddes writes of poems and stories, which can be amended to include photography, “[They] are doing nothing less than grappling with the same double problem of reality. They offer a new world to our imagination in two ways—consoling us with the assurance of order in an everyday world that appears random and chaotic, and promising something new” (Fiddes 2021). The artistic expression offers redemption through the techniques that access the citizen–city myth. Bordun deploys Raphael’s techniques to make the real mythic, Biblical, and ephemeral, thus presenting the viewer with an irrefutable demonstration of Christ’s Resurrection, and redemptions in a cityscape of cruelty and suffering borne of politics.

9. Conclusions

Because photography is both a historical document (fact) and art, the medium of war photography is particularly well-suited to communicate Christian revelation in the post-modern world that doubts the existence of God as a post-World War reaction to the depths of human sin, and casts Christ and Christianity’s principles as corrupted myths. This paper complicates the historicity of photography through a comparison of Bordun’s twenty-first-century work in Ukraine with Raphael’s painting in sixteenth-century Italy, a time and place immersed in Christian belief. Despite the photograph’s basis in fact, the comparison draws out the possibility of finding Christian theology and the experience of redemption within the genre’s immediacy. Photography maintains a particular place in a century filled with doubts. When photography, as an art, successfully relies on and refers to techniques of chiaroscuro [and perspective] through light and dark, and the paradoxes within the presence or removal of the human form, photography creates the possibility that warfare and violence can bring redemption, recalling Christ and His Resurrection.