Fractality and self‐organization in the orthodox iconography

The authors consider the Orthodox iconography of Byzantine style aimed at examining the existence of complex behavior and fractal patterns. It has been demonstrated that fractality in icons is manifested as two types—descending and ascending, where the former one corresponds to the apparent information and the latter one to the hidden causal information defining the spatiality of icon. Self‐organization, recognized as the increase of the causal information in temporal domain, corresponds to contextualization of the observer's personage position. The results presented in the forms of plots and tables confirm the adequacy of the model being the completion of visual perception. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 55–68, 2016