The Icon and the Axe

The iconostasis enabled Russians to combine…tbskJpve of beauty..with their sense of history. LinesT5e7alne~1more supple and color richer as icon panels grew larger and the screens more comprehensive. Just as the individual lives of saints were gradually grafted into vast^ chronicles ofLsaered history, so icons were soon mcOfpofatedTnto thesexomprehensive pictorial records of sacred history that moved from Old Testament patriarchs and prophets in the highest row to local saints in Jhe lowest. The panels in the center moved down to man-??????? God Himself-through the Virgin to Christ, who sat at the center of the main "prayer row" of panels immediately over the royal doors. Modeled on the Pantokrator, who had stared down in lonely splendor from the central dome of Byzantine cathedrals, "Christ enthroned" acquired on the Russian iconostasis a less severe expression. The Lord's hitherto distant entourage of holy figures was brought down from the cupola of earlier Byzantine churches and placed in a row on either side of the traditional images of the Virgin and John the Baptist. These newly visible saints were inclined in adoration toward Christ, who, in turn, seemed to beckon the congregation to join their ranks as He looked straight ahead and held out the gospel, usually opened to the text "Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you."74 As if in response, the faithful pressed forward during and after services to kiss as brothers in Christ the saints who stood closest to them on the sacred screen. This, like most acts of worship and veneration in Orthodox Russia, was accompanied by the bow or prostration of humility and by a sweeping, two-fingered sign of the cross: the public confession of faith.

The development of the iconostasis and the intensification of icon veneration in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Russia set off Russian art frorirtliat of Western "Christendom, where holy pictures were viewed increasingly as optional ornaments withouT~anjTatrinSc_lheological s!gnTr£ cance,73 and where artists were rediscovering-rather than movine awav

oi-helief but on the"ccflcreteluustratiori_of_it5-gloiies. The emotional attachment to sacred pictur amp;TrieTps"~e1ipTain why neither the art forms nor the rationalistic philosophy of classical antiquity played any significant role in the culture of early modern Russia. There were no important Russian imitators of the Renaissance art of Italy and Flanders, despite ample contact with both regions; and the rationalistic ideas that were brought into late medieval Russia through Westward-looking Novgorod appealed only to a small, cosmopolitan elite and were consistently banned by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of icons for Muscovite culture. Each icon reminded man of God's continuing involvement in human"" affairs. ??????????? be immediately apprehended even by thosFincapable of reading or reflection. It offered not a message for thought but an illus-tration_JQjj;eassurance of God's power in and over history for men who might otherwise have been completely mired in adversity and despair.

Amidst this sea of pictures, thought tefHed to crystallize In images

icon of God, justas the whole Orthodox Empire is the icon of the heavenly world."7" The icon screen provided, moreover, a model for the hierarchical order of Russian society. Each figure occupied a prescribed position in a prescribed way, but all were xnrrned by their common distance from the God of the sanctuary, and by their dependent relationship to the central panel of Christ enthroned. The term chin ("rank") was used both for the general order of the icon screen, and for the central deesis, or "prayer row," which was the largest, easiest to see, and the source of many of the most famous large icons now in museums. Chin became the general term for prescribed rank in Muscovy, and its verbal form uchiniti the main word for command. By the seventeenth century, this concept had become the basis of an entire social order. Tsar Alexis' law code of 1649 was an almost icono^rajpuc~^iriB^oiTrI5_D"ehaviof-ot each rank in society; and" a few years Iatertre~rjveTrafaTfed a. chin for his hunting'IaiconsT1"

TTussia was fated to maintain hierarchical forms of^jflciety _while progressively sheddjng^tne religious idealism that haaoririnally sanctioned theja^Alexisnfaw code ??!?^?1???1??^??????^?18??, but the iconographic tradition was shattered and the church split even before the end of his reign