The Icon and the Axe

"If Byzantium was preeminent in giving the world theology expressed in words, theology expressed in images was given preeminently by Russia."56 Of all the methods of depicting the feasts and mysteries of the faith, the painting of wooden icons soon came to predominate in Muscovy. Mosaic art declined as Russian culture lost its intimate links with Mediterranean craftsmanship. Fresco painting became relatively less important with the increasing dependence on wooden construction. Using the rich tempera paints whicnJtad_re^JiC£dJhe encaustic wax paints of the pre-iconoclastic era, Russian artists carried on_and amplified the tendencies which were already noticeable in eleventh- and twelfth^wmtury Byzantine painting: (1) to dematerialize the figures in icons, presenting each saint in a prescribed and styhred~toTn7;"ara^04O]tatroduce new richness of detail, coloring, and controlled emotional intensity. The Russian artist stenciled his basic design from an earlier, Byzantine model onto a carefully prepared and seasoned

panel, and then painted in color and detail. He gradually substituted pine for the cypress and lime of Byzantine icons, and developed new methods for brightening and layering his colors.

Although it is impossible to apply to icon painting those precise techniques of dating and classification familiar to Western art historians, certain regional characteristics had clearly emerged by the late fourteenth century. Novgorod used vigorous compositions with angular lines and unmixed bright colors. Tver had a characteristic light blue, Novgorod a distinctive bright red. Pskov, the nearby "younger brother" of Novgorod, introduced gold highlighting into robes. Distant Yaroslavl specialized in supple and elongated figures, sharing the general preference of the "northern school" for more simple and stylized design. Between Novgorod and Yaroslavl there gradually emerged in the Vladimir-Suzdal region a new style which surpassed the style of either, and produced some of the finest icons in the long history of the art. The paintings of this Moscow school broke decisively with the severity of the later Byzantine tradition and achieved even richer colors than Novgorod and more graceful figures than Yaroslavl. One recent critic has seen in the luminous colors of Andrew Rublev, the supreme master of the Moscow school, inner links with the beauties of the surrounding northern forest:

N

He takes the colors for his palette not from the traditional canons of

color, but from Russian nature around him, the beauty of which he acutely /"

sensed. His marvelous deep blue is suggested by the blue of the spring sky; ?*

his whites recall the birches so dear to a Russian; his green is close to the \

color of unripe rye; his golden ochre summons up memories of fallen \

autumn leaves; in his dark green colors there is something of the twilight \

shadows of the dense pine forest. He translated the colors of Russian na

ture into the lofty language of art.57-¦*

? ¦ ¦' '

Nowhere is Rublev's artistic language more lofty than in his most famous masterpiece, "The Old Testament Trinity," with its ethereal curvatures and luminous patches of yellow and blue. The subject illustrates how Russian iconography continued to reflect the attitudes and doctrines of the church. Since the Trinity was a mystery beyond man's power to visualize, it was represented only in its symbolic or anticipatory form of the three angels' appearance to Sarah and Abraham in the Old Testament. God the Father was never depicted, for no man had ever seen Him face to face. The Holy Spirit was also not represented in early iconography; and when the symbol of a white dove later entered from the West, pigeons came to be regarded as forbidden food and objects of reverence.

Naturalistic portraiture was even more rigorously rejected in Russia

than in late Byzantium; and the break with classical art was even more complete. The suggestive qualities of statuary made this art form virtually unknown in Muscovy; and a promising tradition of bas-relief craftsmanship in Kievan times vanished altogether in the desire to achieve a more spiritualized representation of holy figures.58 The flat, two-dimensional plane was religiously respected. Not only was there no perspective in an icon, there was often a._c_OTS£iojjs^ffgrt_,through so-called mverse pejrsjp^cJiwJo_kee£jhe_ viewer from entering into the composition of a holy picture. Imaginative physical imagery of Western Christendom (such as the stigmata or sacred hearty was foreign to Orthodoxy and finds no representation in Russian art. Fanciful figures of classical antiquity were much less common in RuisiarT than in Byzantine paintingTand many were expressly excluded from Russian icons.