Icons Through History: The Timeless Beauty of Russian Icons

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The text below is the excerpt of the book Icons (ISBN: 9781783107001), written by Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov, published by Parkstone International.

The cathedrals and churches of the South first began to be decorated by ordinary painters. Later, the region was followed by Muscovy in deserting the old fashion. The only people left to revere it were the Old Believers. They adopted as their favourite style that called after the Stróganovs and thus ensured its predominance in the workshops of Moscow and Súzdal’.

The excessive admiration for everything Western which was universal among educated Russians during the eighteenth century suffered a reaction at the time of the war against Napoleon. National feeling was raised to fever pitch, which was sustained by the romantic tendency of the new Russian litterature. The educated classes were drawn into a movement, called on its political side Slavophilism, for restoring and preserving the popular traditions. Educated men in the highest social positions, such as Rumyántsev, Olénin, and Evgéni Bolkhovítinov, Metropolitan of Kiev, began to collect the literary memorials of ancient Russia, chronicles and charters, and encouraged the making of archaeological surveys of ancient monasteries and churches. The icons that attracted most attention, and this chiefly from the historical side, were those famous for working miracles.

Christ Pantocrator, 6th century, Icons — *Christ Pantocrator*, 6th century. Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, Egypt.

In the eighteen twenties and thirties, the number of antiquaries and collectors increased and the foundations of historical museums of Russian antiquities were laid. A great collector of manuscripts and icons was the historian M. P. Pogódin. The documentary side of Russian historical scholarship was encouraged by the Moscow Historical and Antiquarian Society which was founded in 1806. It was upon this documentation that all I. M. Snegirëv’s work on the history of the churches and monasteries of Moscow was based. On the other hand, the chief stimulus to the archaeology of objects was given by the inauguration in St. Petersburg of the Russian Archaeological Society in 1846.

It was this atmosphere which trained for their heroic searches after Russian and Christian antiquities the famous Bishop Porfíri Uspénski, who discovered and collected the most ancient known icons from the Greek East, V. A. Prókhorov, who increased the collection of Russian Antiquities in the Academy of Fine Arts, and I. P. Sákharov, who emarked upon a large-scale Enquiry into Russian Icon-painting but was only able to produce a few fragments. The famous I.E. Zabêlin in his The Manner of Life of the Russian Tsars and Tsaritsas made accessible the main written sources for the archeology of objects, and was the first to publish Materials for a History of Russian Icon-painting.

The Virgin with Child, 14th century, Icons — *The Virgin with Child*, 14th century. National Museum of Ohrid, Macedonia.

In the eighteen sixties the chief authorities on Russian icon-painting were G. D. Filimónov and D. A. Rovínski, natives of Moscow and pupils of the Moscow and Suzdal’ icon-painters. Filimónov was cautious in his work and left no general study of icons, only a biography of Simon Ushakóv, the text of an interesting Pódlinnik, and an account of an excursion to the iconpainting villages. Rovínski attacked the matter more boldly and produced a short History of the Russian Schools of Icon-painting down to the end of the 17th century.

Historical analysis is the natural result of cleaning the icons; this begun at the end of the nineteenth century and special attention has been paid to it. After much labour and minute care, the dark and smoke-begrimed icon reveals bright colours and harmonious shades. Now that they have been cleaned, the decorative beauty of the big icons in the State Russian Museum is so attractive that the neighbouring galleries of modern pictures, with their general effect of grey colouring, look pale and depressing. Formerly the walls of this museum and the great screen of the Uspénski (Assumption) Cathedral at Moscow had nothing to offer but what Bunin calls ‘icons, black planks, poor symbols of God’s might’. Now, out of the black planks, we have restored pictures that attract the eye with their patches of bright colour and the charm of their delicate half-tones.

This show-side of the newly cleaned icons in the museums and private collections attracted the attention of the press, which was carried away by aesthetic enthusiasm and rated them too 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.

Anastasis (wrongly named Descent to the Limbo), 15th century, Icons — *Anastasis* (wrongly named Descent to the Limbo), 15th century. Egg tempera on plaster on canvas, 32.2 x 27 cm. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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 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.

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.