Читать книгу Icons - Nikodim Kondakov - Страница 6

Just as the philological way of studying remnants of antiquity has given way to the archaeological, so now in the history of painting the time has come for a full study, beginning with the theme and the drawing and ending up with the colours. Now that the technique of reproduction in colours has eliminated the hand and become entirely photographic and mechanical, the time has come for science can take into account the historical succession of colouring and pigments and accordingly to make, in icon-painting, a satisfactory distinction between different schools.

Russian icon-painters still distinguish in the history of their craft various schools – Nóvgorod, Pskov, Early Moscow and Stróganov. They base the distinctions upon the colouring; more exactly the flesh tints (in the language of icon-painting (v) okhrénie ‘ochre coat’), which are defined as bright, pale, red, or dark. Further, an icon-painter, after specifying the ochre-coat, pays attention to the tone of the sankir ‘flesh priming’, as he calls the ground coat under all bodies and faces, covered indeed by the ochre layer but appearing in places as a fundamental shadow tint. The reason for this is clear – being unable to study all the details of the drawing, the icon-painter fixes on the visible details of okhrénie, just as students of the history of Western painting traditionally paid special attention to fine shades of difference in the flesh tints. In both cases this method fails to furnish sufficient data, and in important cases connoisseurs study the drawing of hands and fingers, ears and such like to find proofs of their ascription of a painting or drawing to a particular artist. At this point we must recall what has already been said of how the basis of the icon is to be thought in a natural portrait painted for quickness’ sake by the encaustic or wax process. We know further that the progress of this form of painting was a striving for depth and richness of colouring as well as in an airy softness of tint in order to gain a life-like impression, its warmth of flesh tints, and the attractive force of the eyes with their look either penetrating or reflective. The contrasted shadows on the cheeks, brow, and nose, and the bright surfaces on the folds of the draperies gave wax-painting opportunity for rendering a close observation of nature. First, a dark tone was laid on, next the shadows put in with a contrasting light blue and the two patches with their different colours and values were softened by the hot iron, pressed out, to some extent mixed, and this very softening process did away with the sharp edges of the first laying on and blended the tones into a general harmony. The laws of icon-painting demand the same effects, but with the egg or tempera technique they can only be attained in a solid fashion by a long process of laying on one coat after another in gradually heightened tones[49].

43. Saint George (Double-sided icon), Kiev School, end of the 11th century to the beginning of the 12th century.

Egg tempera on lime wood, 174 × 122 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

44. The Prophet Elias in the Desert, 14th century.

Egg tempera on plaster on wood, 35.5 × 28 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the well-known treatise by the monk Theophilus on various arts was available. It dealt with, in the first chapter, – the mixture of colours for the production of flesh tints, that is, the okhrenie, the colour comprised of white lead, vermilion (cinnabar), red ochre, black, etc., he calls membrana. In this complicated recipe, with its directions as to what should be mixed with which and what must be added later, the part which interests us most is the first coat, which is made of white lead burnt until it gives a yellow or greenish (prasinum) colour[50]. This is precisely the darkish, greenish-olive coat which, both in miniatures and in icon-painting of the Greco-Italian school, forms the first coat and underlies the flesh tint made of a mixture of white lead and vermilion, burnt red ochre, and red lead. The green shows at the edges round the oval of the face and along the nose and makes the shadow; it is for the tenth to thirteenth centuries the mark of Byzantinism in painting. The Greek Painters’ Guide of Dionysius of Fourna shows that the proplasmos of Panselinos might likewise be called okhrenie, being made of white lead, ochre, and green with an addition of black[51]. Flesh colour, when lighted, is made of white lead and red ochre; the region of the eyes beginning with the dark sinking of the orbit is done in black mixed with ochre or umber with red ochre. The Russian Painters’ Guide (Pódlinnik), under the heading ‘how to paint the faces of icons’, gives the following directions: ‘To make sankir, ochre and black: to make the first coat of ochre for faces, mix in white lead, vermilion and red: for the second coat make the ochre lighter: to make shadows mix in a little black and put the shadows in. The icon-painters distinguish, in various styles, sankir of various shades and compositions, but agree in denoting by it a dark tint serving as the ground colour for flesh, yet they do not know the origin and meaning of the word.

A second criterion of different schools the modern icon-painters themselves find in is the so-called ozhivki (from ozhivát, ‘to enliven’), a special kind of whitish highlight which, in the form of fine, curly or hooked lines of a pale mixture of colours or even actual white, ‘enlivens’ the light places by the eyes, on the forehead, nose, lips, and even on the joints of the fingers. Frequent use of these distinguishes the severe Greek manner of the old schools and their number decreases century by century from the fourteenth to the seventeenth, though they continue to survive right through the course of Russian icon-painting as an accepted convention. As a matter of fact, these ozhivki rarely add to the real effect of the painting by bringing out the appearance of high relief; they merely make the surface spotty and are connected in one’s mind with the severe school. Even in the seventeenth century, in the big independent icons, they cover the prescribed places on the muscles about the eye and upon the forehead with rows of fine patches of pigment, as it were a luxuriance of finishing work without need or sense. In such rows they receive from the icon-painters the name of dvizhki (from dvigat, ‘move’). A great many such little patches in the case of an icon of poor execution gives a look of boniness to faces, fingers, and limbs.

We have already seen that, in contradiction to the encaustic painting with its rich deep tones[52], there existed the parallel art of wall-painting with its light tones. This occasionally passed into a mere ‘colouring’ or ‘illumination’ of the figures in flat tones with no gradation, meaning there was no real modelling, or merely, a faint lightening of the tones on the big folds of the drapery. This ‘fresco’ scale of light tones finds its way into icon-painting from time to time when the supply of truly iconic models fails, as for instance in the icon-painting of Nóvgorod and northern Russia. The pale style has its coat of pale ochre, whereas the rich colouring has red ochre.

The Greco-Italian icon-painting in the latter half of the fourteenth century and in the fifteenth had under the hands of Paolo and Lorenzo Veneziano and Catarino worked out a warm iconic colouring which gave rise later to the colouring of the great Giorgione. It was not merely the natural surroundings of Venice, the deep, rich evening colouring of the Venetian lagoons, but also the decorative beauty of Greco-Oriental icons adopted by Greco-Italian icon-painting that, as we shall see below, provided the historical foundation for Venetian colouring. The earliest channels by which the lost period of Greco-Oriental painting exercised its influence were the Korsun’ icons; next we have a series of icons with dark ochre flesh, and this is followed by a great influx of Greco-Italian, more particularly Venetian icons which awoke a lively movement in the Russian schools.

The unusual phenomenon of two-coloured reflexes in Greco-Italian and Nóvgorod icon-painting was observed long ago, not as ‘reflexes’ or reflexions of complementary light on the folds of drapery, but as a ‘special form of high light’ (probêl[53]) produced not with white but with other colours. So, following the directions of the Russian Podlinnik, he remarks that in Nóvgorod work of the sixteenth century on a garment coloured maroon (bakán) the folds are streaked with blackish green. But when he describes light blue garments as lightened (probêleny) with maroon and dark blue with purplish red (bágor) he is in error. His mistake is due to probêl being essentially a lightening whereas the dark red tints are used for shadows and not for bright areas. We know something of this practice of using brown colours for drapery with bluish reflexes as far back as the early Christian mosaics in Cyprus, the church of S. Praxed at Rome, on the Virgin’s raiment in the chapel of Venantius in the Lateran[54]. Even the Italian fresco of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries knows the use of greenish reflexes on reddish draperies, still earlier in S. Angelo in Formis in the Neapolitan Campagna where it comes from the Greek Orient[55]. It is important to bear in mind that in the true Byzantine miniatures and frescoes reflexes in complementary colours are not encountered; here reigns the ordinary system of highlights (probêl).

45. The Archangel Gabriel, 1387–1395.

Egg tempera on plaster on canvas mounted on wood, 146 × 106 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

46. The Archangel Gabriel, (panel from a Deisis), beginning of the 15th century.

National Museum, Lviv, Ukraine.

47. Leonardo da Vinci, Saint Jerome, 1482.

Tempera and oil on wood, 103 × 75 cm.

Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican.

Finally, all through the icon-painters are therefore right from an historical point of view in basing the distinctions they draw between various styles and manners (póshib, a smaller class than pis’mó) in Russian icon-painting upon colours, for the colouring really is the criterion of independence and creativeness. As a matter of fact it is most important to realize that I, for instance, know of only one single Russian icon which is an absolute copy of a Greek original. This is the icon of the Nativity of Our Lord in the church at Pskov; it is exactly like a Greek icon in the State Russian Museum; the only difference is in the inscriptions. Naturally such copies if they did exist were only single examples, all other icons were executed in various painting-shops by means of tracings. Besides, we see nowadays that icon-painters learn the drawing and the colouring of one particular manner and are bound to paint just in that manner and no other; only craftsmen trained to paint in other techniques (called podstarínshchiki because they paint pod starinu ‘in an archaic manner’) can copy old icons. For an exact copy of an ancient icon you must go to a podstarinshchik or, better, not to an icon-painter at all but to an ordinary artist. Between the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries we find no such adoption of Greek or rather Byzantine colouring as we do in the twelfth and thirteenth; nor do they quite adopt the colouring of the Italo-Cretan icons Russian icon are easily distinguished. The master or pupil makes up his colours himself. First he mixes raw yolk of egg with thin kvas (rye beer) or water, and drops a little of this mixture which starts rather yellow, into ten or fifteen gallipots, and in these he dissolves his colours, as he has need. The craftsmen of Mstëra or Palëkh, the icon-painting villages of Vladimir, can distinguish in which of their painting shops an icon was produced. When he puts before a customer samples of his colours a painter now offers twenty-four or more: ochre, sankir, light sankir, sankir with white lead, black, bágor, bágor with white, sky colour, prázelen’, white lead with chrome, white lead, reff, golubéts, green, dich’, azure.

To define these colours, which have in the West passed into history, would be difficult and it is not worth while, it would be easier to give a coloured plate with a reproduction of them all. None the less, some general account of them may be given. The names of the colours and the general scale answer to the Pódlinniki and these go back to originals fixed about the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the Podlinniki we have enumerated bágor and bakán, two dark reds, the latter maroon, the other more purplish; they are called Venetian colours. The Virgin’s cloak is of this colour in Italo-Cretan icons: Venetian golubéts is both dark and light blue (said to be a copper blue, verditer); Venetian yellow, a bright chrome yellow; Venetian cinnabar, bright red vermilion; lavra, indigo; azure, ultramarine or its substitutes, coarse indigo (kub) or later Prussian blue; mummy, dark red; umber; reft’, dark grey with a blackish tinge; sankir, ochre and black (see above); soot; red lead; chérvlen’, crimson; Venetian yar’, verdigris (acetate of copper), light green; prázelen’, green with a bluish tinge. We can see clearly the dependence of Russian icon-painting upon the Venetian colours, which were exported all over the east.

Very noticeable is the predominance of red in various tones, also important it is which of the different reds is used and how it is applied. Bright red is the distinguishing feature of the Nóvgorod, Pskov, and in general northern school; this is the colour of Russian folk dress (of the peasant’s shirt, in kumách, what we call Turkey twill). It is from the north that the Moscow school derived its pink hills and buildings and the custom of brightening an icon with red patches of raiment[56]. When we remember that the words miniator, miniatura come from minium (a red colour,) we must believe that in this popular passion for red, we see the action of popular as against sophisticated culture. It is well known that the precious cinnabar was brought from Persia and was long the privilege of royalty and its general use only spread with the close of the Middle Ages. Before then had come in various sorts of brownish red, chérvlen’, bágor and bakán, crimson or dark purplish red. By the shades of red one can judge of the age of an icon; significant in early icon-painting is the appearance of dark maroon or dark lilac purple. We no longer find pure dark blue in ancient Russian icons after the fourteenth century at Nóvgorod; both in icons and wall-paintings we only see lavra (indigo) and blue with a greenish tinge. In Greek icons, dark blue is used before the end of the fourteenth century; in Russia it only appears in the sixteenth. Both light and dark blue are called azure (Iázor’): vissón and is the name for a dark lilac shot with blue: golubéts, a pale blue colour like modern cobalt, only appears during the sixteenth century, and in backgrounds is a sign of western influence.

48. Saint John the Baptist, middle of the 14th century.

Egg tempera on plaster on wood, 87.5 × 66 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

49. Photius Kontoglou, Saint John the Baptist, 1963. Private Collection.

A very interesting colour is prázelen’,[57] which includes not only green but various dark blue tones and indigo. It is the chief mark of Nóvgorod painting in the fifteenth century, being used freely in place of light blue in Greek draperies. It is noticeable that the very word is a corruption of the Greek term used by the Byzantines for the green of grass and the juice obtained from leeks, which has a green colour with a soft brown shade. This green colour has no body in it; it is liquid and transparent and combines very well with brown (it corresponds to terra verde). It is this colour which has most part in the highlights of draperies and in reflexes complementary to brick and chestnut browns.