I had to search a bit to find this collection of western 'icons' I had posted a while back.
Prior to and up to the schism, frescos in Western Churches were virtually the same as in the East, but after the schism the use of statues started to impact on how they viewed the "photostefano" or "halo". Because the statues used a physical disk fixed behind the head of the statue, their two dimensional artwork started to reflect that view. In icons depicting many saints together, the physical disk of one saint would obscure the face of another, and their solution to this was to move the disk from behind their heads to above their heads. That gold disk progressed to Rafael's depiction of a transparent disc where only the edge was visible, so now in the West it is commonly depicted as a gold ring hovering above their head. This is completely divorced from the Orthodox depiction of divine light, radiating from their face like Moses when he descended from the mountain.
What you describe is true, and led to the unfortunate common Western mental image of angels and the Elect wearing halos like crowns, which many of them also have, so in a sense the halo has become a sort of crown icon in the West, which I think is an example of God working to providentially make something good out of a bad situation, since, while it is unfortunate the icon lost its original meaning, I do believe some Western artists did try to convey the idea of divine light with devices other than with the Halo once the Halo became a coronal ring - which is quite possibly, I would note, what the crowns of martyrs might look like, since we do see such rings in God’s creation surrounding the planets, the existence of which was not known at the time of this iconographic transition.
Specifically, if we look at the Aldobrandini Madonna by Rafael, we see a coronal halo, and undeniably the Theotokos has the most glorious crowns of any of those who have received salvation and glorification thanks to God her son (thus I regard godparents as being humans called to form, in relation to the child they have sponsored, an icon of our glorious Lady Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary and her continent husband St. Joseph, who through their holy continent and celibate marriage and parentage and protection of the incarnate Logos, did surely win crowns of both matrimony and virginity in the case of the Theotokos and chastity in the case of St. Joseph. However, we also see her face painted in a luminous manner, along with that of Christ our True God in his holy infancy, relative to the other coloration in the icon.
This is admittedly a more literal approach than would be ideal, but we do have icons painted in a Western style in some of our Orthodox churches, and I feel these should remain where they exist and not be repainted or disposed of, although I am glad that the emphasis has returned throughout the East to painting icons in the traditional manner (under Roman Catholic influence, Western style icons got into the Coptic, Syriac and Armenian churches, and possibly even the Ethiopian Orthodox church, although I personally haven’t seen them - ironically, the Ethiopian preference to paint angels with a medium skin tone that represents the local population results in their iconographic style, which in all key respects embraces the essential qualities that also define traditional Byzantine, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Western icons from before the “Renaissance” resulted in a fixation on naturalism (which was partially reversed with Mannerism, in which we see less nudity and also less of a focus on precise approximation of human anatomy, but Mannerism unfortunately was only a partial capitulation to the conservative elements within the Roman Catholic church).
One Western icon, well, perhaps I should say, icon of the Western Hemisphere, contemporary with the Renaissance, that I love, as an Orthodox Christian, is the very traditional icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This icon is quite special and it is remarkable how the Aztec saint inspired to paint it managed to incorporate elements traditionally a part of Byzantine icons, which it is likely he never saw, for example, there is something like a Mandorla behind the Theotokos in the icon, while also retaining stylistic elements that represent the best of Aztec and indigenous Mexican artwork, much of which was very beautiful, aside from the depictions of the demons worshipped (as Psalm 95 v. 5 warns us) as deities by the Aztecs and surrounding civilizations whom they had effectively enslaved through the genocidal Flower Wars (which were stylized wars that served to control the populations of cities surrounding Tenochtitlan, as a kind of tribute - with those taken prisoner in these stylized wars then being the victims of human sacrifice, and I have seen estimates of a death toll as high 40 million.
Either way, it is a genocide on a massive scale, forgotten by history, and a genocide used insidiously over time as a means of subjugating but not annhilating neighboring populations, but people are largely unaware of it and if asked about a genocide will falsely accuse the Spaniards of having waged one against the people of the colony of Nueva Espana, or modern day Mexico, which is not true - the mass casualties among the indigenous Mexicans were the result of the accidental introduction of smallpox, and so are still the fault of Spain, in that they largely resulted from immoral fornication between the Spanish and the indigenous population, but were not the result of any deliberate effort to engage in biological warfare, which up until this point, had been engaged in only by the Mongols and by Vlad the Impaler and a few others during periods when the Plague was active.
But the beautiful thing about the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe, is that, in addition to being one of the Western icons most evocative of Orthodox icons (moreso even than some pre-schism Romanesque iconography) is that it was that icon, which depicted our glorious Lady Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary with a skin tone like that of the indigenous population, which caused the mass conversion of the Mexica people to Christianity, what is more, to a liturgical Christianity where in recent years the Orthodox Church including the Antiochians and the OCA have been doing very well, and in so doing, led to the complete destruction of the evil Mesoamerican human sacrifice cult and the eradication of all but the most superficial and vestigial traces of the indigenous diabolatrous pagan religion (unfortunately a few vestigial traces or influences remain, syncretized with Roman Catholicism, which I feel the RCC has lately not been doing enough to suppress, for example, the vile “Santa Muerte” cult, which I regard as analogous to the offering of coca leaves and the libations of pure alcohol made to “El Tio”, literally the uncle, but in fact a euphemism for the devil, by the silver miners in greater La Paz, Bolivia (which is not to say that Inca and Aztec religion was in any way actually related other than, like all heathen religions, being something that Psalm 95 v. 5 LXX aptly describes “the gods of the nations are demons.”
It should be noted that the skin tones with which the Theotokos have been depicted in traditional iconography, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, are not unrealistic, I should note, given that many Levantine people have either fair skin or somewhat darker skin which would have been closer to that of the Aztec people, indeed, if we look at the Antiochian Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox Christians of the Middle East, the Suroye, and also at the Assyrian Christians, we will find that while some are very fair, and even have red hair, for example, the current Syriac Orthodox bishop of Mosul, many others have darker skin - and these two groups are of particular interest because we know that a great many of them are descended from early Christian converts from Judaism. Indeed I suspect at least a third of the Jews became Christians, but the total number may have been much higher - for instance, if we look at the Mar Thoma Christians in India evangelized by St. Thomas the Apostle*, who were largely converted from the Kochin Jews of Kerala, the majority of whom converted to Christianity, leaving only a small community almost all of whom immigrated to Israel or to Britain in the 20th century. The most famous Kochin Jew is surely the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, from the prominent Sassoon family.
Additionally, the Ethiopians, who had mostly converted to Judaism, were subsequently converted, beginning with a eunuch baptized by St. Philip the Deacon, one of the two heroic deacons of the first seven deacons ordained in Acts, along with St. Stephen the Protomartyr. ***In contrast, Nicolas the Deacon founded the Nicolaitan sect under the influence of Simon Magus, whose practices were so vile and sexually immoral, vis a vis, the common posession of all property by the men, which for Nicolas and his followers, included their wives, which is to say, they regarded their wives as property and “shared” them, that this sect is the only heresy condemned by name by God, in the epistolary section of Revelation where the incarnate Logos Jesus Christ dictated to St. John the Theologian and Beloved Disciple various messages to be given to different churches. This makes it uniquely notorious, since no other schismatic heretical cult claiming to Christianity was condemned by name (as opposed to merely its founder), which puts it on a worse footing than the Sadducees, Pharisees and Samaritans, who Christ clearly expresses as being in error, but does not declare hatred for them. Rather only the heathens
*St. Thomas, as is well known by Eastern Christians but not to the same extent by Western Christians, was martyred in Kerala in 53 AD, and whose evangelical strategy basically consisted of following the most popular trade route to India resulting from the conquests of Alexander the Great, basically, overland from Syria through Edessa, NIneveh and Seleucia-Cstesiphon to the Persian Gulf (one would presumably embark either in Seleucia-Cstesiphon** or in the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates, down towards Tikrit or Basra, and then sail out the Persian Gulf to the port of Kerala in the Malankara state along the Malabar Coast of India.
**This city, I would note for the benefit of readers less familiar with Mesopotamian and Middle Eastern geography, is still commonly called Babylon, although the Tigris had shifted and old Bablyon was abandoned, and it would shift again leading to the abandonment of this second city in favor of a third, Baghdad, which has grown to the point where it directly borders the ruins of old Babylon, unfortunately for archaeologists, since these ruins were looted with the downfall of Saddam’s regime in 2003 along with the collection of the National Museum of Iraq. But it was Seleucia-Cstesiphon that was historically the cathedral city of the Catholicos of the East, the Patriarch of the Church of the East, which at one time was the largest Christian denomination at least in terms of geography, expanding from the island of Socotra off the south coast of Yemen to the Caspian Sea in Persia, and from Nisibis in modern day Turkey all the way across Asia along the Silk Road, via cities such as modern day Tehran, and lost cities along the route such as Merv in what is now Turkmenistan, all the way to Mongolia and China, and from here the church streched south across the mighty Himalayas to Tibet, and from thence to the Malabar Coast of India, and Sri Lanka.
The Muslim warlord Timur the Lame, also known as Tamerlane began a dreadful genocide in the 12th century, which was a century characterized by many Christians being martyred, so many as to really be rivaled only by the 20th and 21st century genocides in the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Albania, Nazi Germany, and other places ruled by left-wing nihilist materialist death cults (for example, against the Christians of North Korea) and by Islam, and to a lesser extent, Buddhism and Hindusim. This 12th century Genocide killed off the entire Church of the East, as well as the parallel Syriac Orthodox and West Syriac-speaking Antiochian hierarchy that existed in many of the same areas, so that the only surviving portions of the Church of the East were in the Fertile Crescent, chiefly the Nineveh Plains, Mosul, and Baghdad and certain parts of Iran and Syria (which partially overlaps the Syriac Orthodox, who were in the same areas but extended more to the West in Turkey and more to the Southwest into Lebanon and the Holy Land, as far as Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and who were also predominant in Tikrit), and also the Malabar Coast of India, where the Mar Thoma Christians were grouped as a caste known as the “Nasranis” who despite the martyrdom of St. Thomas by an enraged Maharajah in 53 AD in Kerala (the site of which is the oldest continually operating cathedral in the world, the second oldest probably being Holy Etchmiadzin in Armenia and the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (parts of which were built after St. Helena had located it around 320 as part of her expedition to Jerusalem to rebuild the city that had lost most of its population and been renamed Aeolia Capitolina following the failed Bar Kochba revolt in 130 AD, which turned out to be a blessing for the Christians as the important historic sites had largely been ignored by the Romans, who used the city only as a secure center for the government of Syria Palestina, almost as a glorified fortress).
