State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Besides this, the setting, although it only had the same two words, paláty – buildings, and górki – hills, to express its two main kinds, also changed in character. The buildings were at first painted in accordance with the Greek custom, two porticoes joined by a wall or by a curtain making a conventional, pseudo-classical scene for the action to take place. But even in the Nóvgorod style the buildings are different; churches appear and often have local views. More permanent was the vogue of the background in the shape of two mountains, one to the right supposed to be towards the east and illuminated by the rosy light of the sunset, the other to the west overspread with the on-coming darkness expressed by the complementary lilac or bluish reflexion. Usually these two mountains make up the desert as the Greeks understood it; they placed there hermits, prophets, and holy men and made it the scene of the deaths of martyrs. But we shall see that even at Nóvgorod, they drew the saints standing upon marble floors or on carpets, following Italian models; later come fields with flowers; as the buildings give place to views of the city, so the mountains become rounded hills. All these points serve to mark the various manners distinguished by the modern icon-painters.
Be this as it may, the main thing is the actual drawing and the essence of this is the power to make the sketch or outline of the figure and face. Icon-painters have from early times, it seems, divided this into the drawing of the face (lichnoe from lik or litsó ‘face’) and the preliminary drawing that comes before the face (dolíchnoe), i.e. the backgrounds and figures. The mere pupil (dolíchnik) who paints the preliminary part leaves the faces to be put in and the work finished by the skilled craftsman or face-painter (lichnik) even in detailed and many-figured icons, much more so in icons with only one figure[43].
Moreover, from the sixteenth century on, the free painting which executed icons on wood and schemes of wall decoration, gave way to a certain extent to mechanical reproduction by means of tracings from icons pierced, with soot which transferred the main lines of the drawing to the damp gesso. Such tracings, stencils, or patterns were collected by the painters and formed the basis of the Litsevye Pódlinniki, of which the best was found in the remote monastery of Siysk near Archangel. The pattern here illustrated is the work of Basil Kondakov of Usolye, who collected many others. This represents the composition called the New Testament Trinity and also Paternity and bears both titles[44]. It is copied from a design by the great icon-painter Simon Ushakóv which appeared as the first Russian etching. Characteristically in tracing it has been reversed, God the Father should have Christ on his right, and the cross is clearly the wrong way round. It was probably traced from the centre of a great composition of the Creed or the Last Judgement. These patterns often have indications of the colours to be used on different parts. The design is originally western, and the representation of the dove is most peculiar[45]. It is possible that that such a mechanical copy gave no scope for change, and of course in these reproductions the Greek design preserves its general character. But the human hand has to go over the whole of the mechanical copy and in course of time the copy or reproduction suffers change.
We see in the wall-paintings of Kiev, Pskov, Nóvgorod and Ládoga how different the types, costumes, and trappings are from the true Byzantine originals, and we are right in seeking their originals – not in the monuments of Constantinople but in the work on the Balkan Peninsula, in Asia Minor, and even in the productions of Greco-Oriental icon-painting. Evidently, the earliest Russian icon-painting worked in two manners; one a severe, definite, and plastic manner close to Byzantine (Constantinopolitan) art in its refined style of the tenth to twelfth centuries, and another broad and simple with straight vertical folds of the drapery and coarse patches of red upon the pale cheeks of the faces.
39. Angelos, Christ Pantocrator Enthroned, end of the 15th century. Teutonic Cemetery, Vatican.
40. The Crucifixion, 12th century. National Museum of History and Ethnography of Svaneti, Mestia, Georgia.
By the end of the fourteenth century the Russian icon had reached its full stature and, at the same time, took on such different characteristics that we can distinguish them clearly, guiding ourselves by a certain basis common to the different branches and then marking off the more definite types and establishing their models. The Byzantine drawing had by now fallen to pieces and with its exaggerated refinements it had become unintelligible to the craftsmen and beyond their execution. However, it just happened that the early Greco-Oriental models had simplified the design and worked out a new scheme; how far this was the case we can see by comparing the complicated folds of the Apostles’ clothing, chiton and himation, in Byzantine icons and the same in Russian icons of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. A whole series of half-figures of Christ preserves the Byzantine type but has changed the ordinary drawing of the drapery: on Christ’s left shoulder there hangs down in the form of a triangle a corner of the himation thrown under that shoulder when the cloak was draped round the body from behind, whereas that angle should have been covered in its turn by the last end of the cloak thrown round over the shoulder: the natural order has been disregarded for the sake of effect. Further, at the edge of the right arm a saint’s himation makes a tiny segment which ought either to go to the left shoulder or be thrown under the arm and pass across the chest, but it is not clear quite how it falls. We shall see what new and complicated difficulties arose from Byzantine drawing of drapery as remodelled by Rublëv in imitation of the Greek Theophanes. But the drawing of the Nóvgorod icons of the fifteenth century is quite different and comparatively crude: to compare it with the magnificent, if contorted, figures of the wall-paintings is to bring us from an artistic world to one of journeymen.
Let us take the half-length of S. Thomas which at first sight looks Byzantine in style, so much are the chiton and himation ‘broken up’ by a series of folds, angular, tight and dry, and so much are these folds covered with bright planes and these planes emphasized by highlights of white lead. Further, the hand, painted as in the Greek icons in the act of blessing, the sturdy broad-shouldered body, the youthful head with its sharp oval, and the line round the eyes, everything is Greek. But this is set against what appears to be pupils’ work, the figure has clearly no chest, the drapery is, as it were, hung on the back of a chair or cut out of tin-plates, some of the folds quite unintelligible, and the head is too small for the body.
What a difference there is in the figure and drapery of the Archangel Gabriel in the State Russian Museum, which, however, belongs to the early fifteenth century and is part of the Deesis tier of the old iconostas in the Súzdal’ Cathedral. The body has delicately sloped shoulders, unlike the ordinary Byzantine type; the face keeps the characteristic Attic oval, but is bent downwards in deep thought. Unlike the Byzantine, the drapery is all soft with wide folds. Clearly we have before us a new style using the forms of the Greek iconography, the style of the Italian trecento; hence the feminine look of the Archangel, with his hair done in thick locks like a woman’s. The technique of the actual painting is quite different, the lighted planes are few and not sharp, fine gradations of half-tones model the folds and the whole manner is already ‘fused’ as it will be in the sixteenth century.
These are one or two examples of transitional manners of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: there is no need for the moment to go through the different varieties of Byzantine, Russo-Byzantine, or Greco-Oriental icons, nor yet the local Russian schools of Nóvgorod and Súzdal’, nor to touch on the special points of drawing in the icons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When we come to these groups in their historical order their varieties will appear of themselves. Now we only wish to show that in judging of the drawing in icons we must fix our attention not on what it has in common with the Byzantine, but on the historical distinctions and changes.
Artistic
For a similar division of labour under Akbar
After N. P. Kondakov,
I added this to the author’s selection of plates because it illustrates the ways of icon-painters and affords an example of perhaps the most important composition which he had not included. E. H. M.
