highly. Magazine writers disregarded the historical side of the matter and glorified the newly discovered ‘great, inspired and magnificent art’, ‘an enormous addition to the world’s stock of artistic treasures’; fancy divorced from criticism found in icon-painting; ‘a free idealism’ which was supposed ‘to know neither space nor time, living amid unknown mountains and plains, essentially cut off by a great gulf from history, literature, nature herself and life’. To counteract these extravagances there was imperative need for a critical estimate of select examples, a definite course of investigation, and a practical application of scientific method guided by comparison and historical classification.
An opportunity for this was afforded by the enlightened action of the See of Novgorod. In the diocesan museum and in the church of Ss. Peter and Paul[10] it was found possible to clean the most ancient Novgorod icons, and this gave a real basis for investigating the history of icon-painting in the Novgorod period. This investigation, joined with that of the Greek models, made it possible to confute the view that tradition was immovable.[11]
The Russian icon began, of course, by imitating the Greek model, but this model was not always accessible (e.g. in Novgorod) and began itself to change: the Greek or purely Byzantine style gave way to the Greco-Oriental, this to the Greco-Italian, and finally to the Neo-Greek style. So the Russian icon lived by tradition, mainly because it was satisfied with being a craft without pretending to creativeness, but it adopted one tradition after another following each new pattern. The fact is that the Greek icon, for all its changes, equally kept to tradition because it, likewise, was a mere handicraft.
But as a craft, the Russian icon brought forth real talents, and they made use either of their own personal creativeness or else adapted new examples and types. These talents at once found pupils, forming and developing schools of craftsmen who spread abroad their style and manner. The main reason why they were successful was because they did not violate tradition but aimed at an improved execution of an inherited model. The process of perfecting the form brought with it a national remodelling of the foreign original, and side by side with this, a new spiritual content expressing itself in the improved form and due to personal feeling. But any new contribution was typically Russian and so easily accepted. Accordingly, the processes of artistic creation in Russia were such that we can lay bare the actual mechanism by which it lived and changed. Artistic phenomena may have been simpler in Russia than abroad, but the area over which development went on was very wide, comprising the lands of Novgorod, Pskov, Tver’, Vólogda and all the north, besides Suzdal’ and Moscow: it was a civilizing work which spread over all Muscovite Russia, the most advanced part of the Eastern European plains. The development of the artistic form in drawing and colouring must not take all our attention to the neglect of content; both on the religious side, the choice and invention of the theme or subject and its composition, and also on the side touching material life, the store of types, their setting, buildings, landscapes, clothing and vestments, and everything which is meant by iconography. Thus, we shall see that though ancient Russia was divided from western Europe by the great gulf which looks insuperable to the eye of the political historian from the time of the Mongol invasion, we can observe in Russian icon-painting essentially the same movement as that which was going on in the West; but here its greater force and brilliancy led up to the general achievement of Europe in the Renaissance. In Russian icon-painting we can see, from the end of the fourteenth century, a change in direction turning the iconographic tradition towards feeling and expression. This break both enlivened the form and also changed the religious idea expressed by the icon; instead of the Byzantine dogma we have religious life, drawing man nearer to God. At the same time, the types change from Greek to Russian and the iconographic scheme is enriched with subsidiary groups and more elaborate settings: it wakes up, loses its deadness, and becomes alive and picturesque. We shall see later that the more perfect icon-paintings of the Novgorod and Moscow schools in the sixteenth century answer, in their complicated composition, theological subjects, and comparatively severe and correct drawing to the full Renaissance in Italy. The natural inference is that, besides the historical parallel between the two arts, we have to reckon with the direct influence of foreign, mostly Italian, examples and also of artists coming if not from Italy then from the Greek East, subject since the fifteenth century to the artistic influence of Italy.
4. Our Lady Hodegetria (Double-sided Icon), 12th century. Byzantine Museum, Kastoria, Macedonia.
5. Christ Pantocrator, end of the 13th century. Egg tempera on plaster on wood, 47.5 × 30 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
6. Christ Pantocrator, 12th century. Mosaic. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.
7. The Virgin with Child or “Virgin glykophilousa”, Cretan School, c. 1500. 332 × 332 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
My long-continued study of the iconography of the Virgin in Byzantium, in western Europe, and in Russia, led me to the discovery that many ancient, and even wonder-working icons of the Virgin, now cherished and revered in Russia, have their prototypes and patterns in Greco-Italian icons of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.[12] The characteristic style of these icons was already, in the fifteenth century, prominent in wall-painting and became the model for icon-painting first at Suzdal’, then Novgorod, and finally all over Russia; however, its influence was weaker in the Novgorod school, which early lost the Byzantine manner and refinement. This style even received the honourable name of ‘Greek’ as opposed to the ‘Frankish’ (Fryázhski) style, a mixture of late Greek and Western art. This streak of foreign influence, enlivening the decadence of the Byzantine scheme and meeting the spiritual demands of the nation, runs so clearly through the whole domain of Russian icon-painting that it is just the path which was wanted to lead Russia through its terra incognita. It gives us a definite historical landmark which enables us more or less to take our bearings and, best of all, to get away from that domination of the mere ipse dixit which marks both barbarism and superficial aesthetic criticism.[13]
Modern aestheticism in Russia, coming from dilettantes and journalists, hastened to declare the Russian icon to be ‘great art’, the discovery of which would astonish Europe and which would claim a place as a ‘new world-treasure’.[14] According to these commentators, the Russian icon may no doubt repeat the Byzantine composition but it saves its ‘creativeness’ by artistic reproduction of it: the icon has ‘style’, which, they maintain, is wanting in Italian art of the same date, so the latter sinks into a ‘provincial art’. According to them the role played by the Pódlinniki with models for icon-painting is very much exaggerated, the idea being that the brilliant period of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries had no such thing as perevódy, that is, as it were, stencils for tracing icons, nor yet foreign models. The style of the Russian icon is supposed to be without expression and without narrative; it is not tied to life and to its reality, it is a ‘pure art’. Its types are in themselves national and though the Russian figure of Christ is of a foreign type, still they hold that it contains a ‘Russian soul’. The Russian icon is made out to be ‘aristocratic’; its ‘idealism is immovable’ and ‘open to the contemplation of miracle’. Everything in an icon is ideal; even the buildings and hills offer an ‘imaginary world’, with types ‘imponderable’, ‘fined away in their idealism’. The worship of a sacred art devoted to icons always kept its hold on Russia, and pointed to the East not to the West. In this art, the line and the design are ruled by tradition: the colours, their selection and blending belong to the individual; according to their special prescriptions we distinguish the different schools. The bright colour of Russian icons and the striking beauty of the combinations of shades are, all in all, the strength of the Russian icon.
To
For this church see P. Gusev in
Newly cleaned icons: A. I. Anísimov,
N. P. Kondakov, Iconography of the B. V. M.: Connexions, P. 1910
N. P. Likhachëv,
P. Murátov, ‘History of Painting, I. Introduction to the History of Old Russian Painting, II. Origin of Old Russian Painting’, in vol. vi of I. Grabar’,
