The Holy Image Makers

Today’s Moscow Icons Workshop occupies a cold cellar in a high panel house in the industrial town of Zelenograd near Moscow. The painters have no money to pay the rent and there is a threat that they will lose their premises altogether.

Though this is a situation not unknown to the vast majority of creative people in Russia, the irony is that this workshop is considered one of the best in Russia. During the 5 years of its existence, it has taken part in 30 exhibitions, including in Switzerland, Greece, South Africa and elsewhere.

Workshop leader Igor Drozhdin explained: “There is a great demand for icons now. But we make icons for small provincial churches free of charge.”

One of its most recent successes was the creation of the iconostases for the Church of St. Nicholas on central Moscow’s Bersenevskaya Embankment.

“For the Church of St. Nicholas we worked for a year and created 14 icons,” Drozhdin added, mentioning that the church used to be used as a place for hiding pornographic literature. He also told of a miracle which occurred with the icons — some of them started leaking with chrism.

This occurrence  shows that despite historical turbulences the ancient perception of icons in Russia has remained firmly in the public consciousness over the centuries. In old Russia, icons were vital to people’s lives, occupying a place of honor, and mysterious and healing qualities like the above have always been ascribed to them.

They were kept on small altars in the home, attached to poles at the roadside or carried high above troops setting off on military campaigns. In the 10th century, the icon-painting monk Alimpius healed people  by placing brushes on aching body parts. The icon of the Kazan Virgin, carried around Moscow in the 16th century, was believed to have saved the city’s inhabitants from plague.

However, for modern man to enter the artistic world of the icon he needs to develop the ability to understand its symbolic meaning, to appreciate its original style. In the Middle Ages most icon painters were monks, and the 16th century Council of the Hundred Chapters, which regulated church life in Russia, defined necessary qualities: “meek, mild, pious, not given to idle talk or laughter, not quarrelsome or envious, not a thief or a murderer.”Monks usually fasted for several days before starting the icon painting process, and constantly chanted prayers.

An icon was also considered to be a personified prayer. Almost every icon was looked upon as a likeness of a church, the model of the cosmos. The hierarchical ladder, the pyramid, the pivot, the integrity and the subjugation of parts were all considered the basis of world order, and the means by which to overcome chaos and darkness. This idea found its expression in the compositional structure of every icon.

Traditional icon painting embodied general ideas of the world through the portrayal of events from the life of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints. The symbolism of the icon not only concerns individual motifs but embraces the entire icon. It is founded on the philosophy of late antiquity, that everything in the world is only an outer layer which obscures the true meaning. For example the representation of the circle (the ancient solar sign) is the symbol of heaven and divinity.

Color symbolism also existed. Red meant the passions of Christ, blue was the spiritual color of heaven, green personified joy and yellow the treachery of Judas.

A life of St. Sergius tells of how he built the Trinity Cathedral “that it might conquer the fear of the hateful strife existing in this world by contemplation of the Holy Trinity.”

These words apply not only to Rublyov’s famous Trinity but all traditional Russian icons. The most wonderful of these were created not only to be worshipped, to provide aid and healing, but also for man to find solace, joy and harmony with the world after admiring the icon’s beauty. The moral and educational power of the icon comes into effect when people admire its artistic qualities.

After the revolution, the centuries-old tradition of icon-painting was broken. It became illegal to paint icons, which were considered religious propaganda. Thousands were burnt and destroyed, many more smuggled or sold to the West. Others still were nationalized in Leon Trotsky’s program to provide ‘famine relief,’ which in fact brought the state huge revenues.

But in the last 10 years, the tradition of icon-painting (and that of icon smuggling — see The Changing of Customs, p. 4) has begun a slow revival. Now there are icon workshops in all major monasteries — notably in Sergiyev Posad outside Moscow, in Optina Pustyn near Kaluga and in Novgorod’s St. George’s Monastery. Moscow itself has 15 workshops.

One of these is run by four women, headed by Alyona Knyazeva-Rishenkova, an icon-painter since 1989. A professional painter, she graduated from Moscow’s Kalinin Art and Industry Institute. Her interest in icons began with restoration work, and she started making spiski, copies of old icons. She studied various techniques — the Greek, Moscow, Novgorod, Yaroslavl and Stroganov schools.

One of the landmarks in Alyona’s career as an icon painter was her meeting with monks from the Mount Athos monastery in Greece. These monks brought icons painted in a manner more expressive and dramatic than Russian icons. Now Alyona and her pupils often combine the Greek manner with the Russian.

The workshop strictly preserves all the old techniques. Icons are painted on wooden boards covered with levkas, a mixture of chalk, linen oil and glue, which itself is made of bones and skin of sturgeon. The paints used are exclusively natural and made by the painters themselves. For blue, for example, they use crushed lapis lazuli and for green malachite. The pigments are mixed with eggs and water. This type of tempera painting allows them to put on thin, transparent layers of paint. Thin leaves of real gold are also used.

Knyazeva-Rishenkova’s workshop creates icons for home altars, churches and collectors. As she explained, nowadays many people order icons for gifts.

One private company ordered the icon Boris and Gleb as a gift to President Yeltsin, whose grandsons bear these names. This work combines traditional iconography with exact depictions of the saints’ costumes copied from authentic costumes from the Kremlin Armory Museum.

One of Alyona’s innovations is the use of antique metal crucifixes inserted in the middle of the icon. Crucifixes were always considered effective in the fight with evil forces.

“After I started painting icons, my outlook on the world changed,” said Alyona. “The painter has to feel the icon with his heart and soul. Not every artist can paint an icon. Before starting our work we light a lampada [an oil lamp hanging in front of an icon] and pray.”

An icon is usually painted over a period of three months. Sometimes two or three craftsmen work on one icon. The most experienced will paint the faces, while his students paint architecture, costumes, trees and hills.

Knyazeva-Rishenkova’s work includes the Virgin Never Fading Flower. This work is surprising for the intricacy of its details — in ornaments, costumes and architecture. The profundity and sadness of the mood of the mother about to lose her child is testament to the feminine  talent of its painters.

Knyazeva-Rishenkova’s workshop also runs an icon-painting school, sponsored by her businessman husband.

Another workshop called Canon also combines different ways and styles of painting, sometimes experimental. Pavel Pushkaryov works traditionally, his large icon St. Sergius of Radonezh being full of dignity and classical splendor. He also creates wonderful miniature icons (see above and on opposite page, photo by Vladimir Obrosov), painted on shell, mother of pearl, ivory and silver.

Karl Sheinkman, meanwhile, creates icons using a cloisonne enamel technique. These works are reminiscent of mosaics with shining golden backgrounds and bright colors.

Whatever the variations on icon-painting styles and innovations by the new generation may be, the purpose will always be the same. “Icons carry on spiritual traditions from generation to generation,”concluded the Moscow Icon Workshop’s Igor Drozhdin. “We are connected to our ancestors through icons. If the traditions are preserved, then the culture and the people will flourish and develop in the future.”

A history of the genre

The earliest Russian icons (the word ikona in Russian means ‘holy image’) appeared in Kiev in the 10th-11th centuries. They were based on Byzantine prototypes, with large icons similar to frescoes and their subdued colors and symmetry of composition expressing epic calm and serenity.

At the end of the 14th century, another wave of Byzantine influence spread over Russia. Theophanes the Greek, court painter of the Paleologue dynasty, came to work in Russia, and influenced Russian artists with his tragic, dramatic art.

One of the high points in Russian icon painting was the early 15th century art of Andrei Rublyov. Philosophical depth and symbolic characters of images are perfectly reflected in composition, the musical rhythms of lines and luminous shining colors in Rublyov’s icons. These icons were created during the final years of struggle with the Mongol-Tatar yoke, and Prince Dmitry Donskoi took them to the decisive battle of Kulikovo Polye (1380).

As well as Rublyov’s Moscow school, icon-painting flourished in the free city of Novgorod, with a style close to folklore traditions — naive, but attractive because of the spontaneity of expression, bright colors and childlike simplicity.

At the end of the 15th century, Dionysius created masterpieces which influenced icon painting for two centuries. The art of Dionysius is mature, restrained, noble and profoundly human. Dionysius was a delicate colorist, his colors forming harmonious chords, especially in stately scenes with large numbers of characters. In the 16th century icons acquired a narrative character, but this literary, didactic aspect did not obscure the visual attraction of the images. A century later, the influence of Western European art appeared in icon-painting. Icons of that period are small, resembling jewelry with their enamel-like colors and intricate detail.

However, the reforms of Peter the Great led to the Westernization of Russian society and with this a slump in interest in icons. The unique art emerged again only at the beginning of the 20th century, after two hundred years of obscurity. Most old icons had been painted over, or covered with metal mountings or candle soot, making them hardly visible.

It was only with the revival of interest in old Russian themes and the appearance of the first collectors — Ivan Ostroukhov, Ilya Kondakov and the Shchukin family — that the old icon masterpieces finally had the dust swept off them. The first to be restored was Andrei Rublyov’s Old Testament Trinity, whose shining colors and harmonious composition made a deep impression on its first viewers. The first exhibition of restored icons, mostly from the Novgorod school, took place in 1913. Everyone who saw it was stunned by their beauty, including French artist Henri Matisse, who was so inspired by their unique artistic language that he tried to express something similar in his art. Masters of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s — like Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova and Natalya Goncharova — were also strongly influenced.

Olga Listsova is a reporter for the English language newspaper The Moscow Tribune.