Читать книгу Russian Painting - Peter Leek - Страница 4

Up to the middle of the sixteenth century, in addition to Christ, the Virgin Mary and saints or angels, icon painters generally restricted their imagery to figures from the Old and New Testaments. Then, in 1551, Ivan the Terrible convened a Stoglav (ecclesiastical council) to settle a variety of issues, including the question of whether the depiction of living people in icons was sacrilegious. The council’s somewhat cryptic ruling was interpreted as sanctioning the inclusion of tsars and historical or legendary figures alongside those culled from the Bible. As a result, icon painting gradually widened its ambit, both in terms of style and content until, during the schism that split the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century, Nikon (the reforming patriarch) and Avvakum (the leader of the conservative Old Believers) vied with one another in their attempts to restore iconic purity. Nikon smashed, burned or poked out the eyes of icons that departed from the Byzantine tradition, especially those that included secular figures while Avvakum railed against innovations and foreign influences in language of a violence scarcely less than Nikon’s.

But the ruling of Ivan’s Stoglav had unwittingly paved the way for the spread of non-religious art. To escape the attentions of Nikon and Avvakum and their henchmen, painters turned to portraiture and other varieties of artistic endeavour. One result was a vogue for parsunas (from the Latin persona), pictures of living people similar in style to icons, but of a non-religious nature. These were usually painted on wooden panels, rather than on canvas. At first they were extremely stylized, and the emphasis was not so much on capturing character as on conveying the sitter’s place in society. But before long the parsuna gave way to a more realistic type of portraiture. For example, the portrait of Peter the Great’s jester Jacob Turgenev, painted by an unknown artist some time before 1696, has a psychological depth and an irony absent from most parsunas. The quizzical shrewdness of the jester’s expression and the way his powerful figure fills the canvas may have been meant to suggest that wisdom is not exclusive to princes, nor folly to fools.

6. Ivan Kramskoï, Portrait of Pavel Tretyakov, 1876. Oil on canvas, 59 × 49 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.