Оглавление
Nikodim Kondakov. Icons
Introduction
Origins: the Orient and Greece
Use and Place of Icons in Russia
The Technique
Colouring and Pigments in Russian Icon-painting
The 12th to 14th Centuries: Súzdal and Novgorod, the Greco-Italian school
The 14th and 15th Centuries: the Súzdal School and Andreï Rublëv
The 16th Century
Mystical and Didactic Subjects
The Early 16th Century, Novgorod and Pskov
The 16th Century, Moscow
The 17th Century
The Stroganov School and the Early 17th Century
The Mid 17th Century, Ushakov
The Late 17th Century, Decadence
Glossary
Time-Line of Icon Painting
Bibliography
Отрывок из книги
1. Map of Russia, between the 11th and the 13th centuries.
Among graphic arts, the icon took first place in Russian life. Apart from the early Novgorod wall-painting, we may call the icon the chief expression of religious thought and popular feeling as early as the fourteenth century. Later, when wall-painting became subordinate to icon-painting, the icon became the one and only symbol of faith. In view of its special significance and its derivation from the Byzantine model, the Russian icon takes its place as the continuation of a high artistic tradition and in its development offers an unparalleled example of artistic craftsmanship. In its decorative qualities, the uniqueness of its composition, the severity of its types, the ideal character and spiritual depth of the religious thought it conveyed, the icon is to be compared with the early period of religious art in Western Europe. Besides this, the historian of art must bear in mind that the easel-picture arose over time from the icon. They must make every effort to comprehend the artform of the Russian icon in order to understand the historical traditions lying behind easel painting and influencing it to this day. Finally, from the early eighteenth century to the present day, the Russian icon has long existed as a handicraft or kustár’ product.[1]
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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 show that this aesthetic theory is absolutely wanting in any scientific consistency or philosophical content there is no need to analyse it as a whole or in detail: it is sufficient to confront it with a statement founded upon history and an analysis of the facts.
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