Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia

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The craft of icon-making is set into the context of forms of worship that emerged in the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century. Oleg Tarasov shows how icons have held a special place in Russian consciousness because they represented idealized images of Holy Russia. He also looks closely at how and why icons were made. Wonder-working saints and the leaders of such religious schisms as the Old Believers appear in these pages, which are illustrated with miniature paintings, lithographs and engravings never before published in the English-speaking world. By tracing the artistic vocabulary, techniques and working methods of icon painters, Tarasov shows how icons have been integral to the history of Russian art, influenced by folk and mainstream currents alike.

As well as articulating the specifically Russian piety they invoke, he analyzes the significance of icons in the cultural life of modern Russia in the context of popular prints and poster design. A Tract Concerning the New Devotion 3.

Some of his successors notably his daughter Elisabeth, reigned were favourably inclined towards Orthodoxy; Catherine the Great's wise consort Potyomkin aimed to heal the Schism. But religion not necessarily Orthodox had to wait till the time of Alexander I to enjoy a considerable revival. Though all these vicissitudes, as Tarasov demonstrates, the icon enjoyed amazing productivity, and offers us a way into the thoughts and feelings of the multitude.

Oleg Tarasov's Ikona i blagochestie: For this first translated version with its modified sub-title, it has been substantially revised and edited by the author and myself working in close collaboration. The second of its original three sections 'History of the Craft', most of which dealt with the minutiae of icon production in the Vladimir Province during the 19th century has been eliminated as being of less interest to the general reader or art historian than the rest of the volume, though a good deal of its material has in fact been redistributed to other chapters.

The opportunity has been taken to make use of recent scholarship. Explanatory notes included among the References , chiefly on historical topics, have sometimes been necessary: I have tried to keep these to a minimum. Occasionally I have added a Russian word in brackets for the benefit of those who know the language, or left a culturally specific term untranslated e.

I explain these on first occurrence. Readers will soon appreciate the great conceptual and stylistic range of Tarasov's work and quoted materials: It would be idle to pretend this has not posed special problems of translation: As an example of the intractability of the translator's task, one may mention that the Russian word blagochestie in the book's title means in English both 'devotion' and 'piety' and both are used as appro- priate in the text ; by contrast, as readers of chapter Four will discover, two words for the English 'face' lik and litso have had to be distinguished in translation, despite the measure of artificiality that this implies.

For the many biblical quotations I have followed the Authorized Version, with which most English readers have a special familiarity. Names of saints, dedications and titles of icons have led to problems for which perhaps arbitrary solutions have had to be found, unless there is an easily recogniz- able Western or Greek equivalent. Following Orthodox practice, I have referred throughout to the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God, save where the context is unambiguously Western.

Her many variant icons often have titles with a place name component: The specifically Russian feast day Pokrov often misleadingly rendered as 'Intercession' but implying 'protecting veil' has been left in transliterated form. Where standardized English forms exist e. I have preferred the forms of the names Dimitriy Rostovsky, Simeon Polotsky to the forms 'of Rostov, of Polotsk' respectively.

Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia

Names of Russian rulers from Peter the Great onwards are rendered in anglicized form. Dates up to are given in the 'Old Style', i. Many friends and colleagues answered queries on individual points of this translation; my warmest thanks to them all. We know that the 'New Devotion' in 14th-century Western Europe was accompanied by radical changes in the concept of the visual image. Risking some simplification, it can be said that a similar situation came about in mid-i7th-century Russia. Hitherto, Russian icons had shown the saints making the sign of blessing with two fingers, while the abbreviated name of Christ used the letters 'IC XC.

In icons of the new devotion the name of Christ was abbreviated as 'IMC XC, and three fingers formed the sign of blessing. These apparently simple changes occurred amid profound shifts in Russian culture and mass consciousness.

The new type of icon and the new devotion were the result of the influence of Renaissance ideas at the Russian court. They were also linked with the individualization of religious sensi- bility, the appearance in Russia of Western, Latinized rhetoric, and, finally, the gradual decay of the icon-painting canon and the replacement of the Byzantine and Old Russian icon by religious painting in the official Church. Meanwhile, the old type of icon, with the older symbolism, remained closely connected with the popular culture of the Russian Old Ritualists, often known as the Old Believers.

They rejected the mid-i7th-century 23 Church reforms and continued to live - as their successors do to this day - according to the established devotional norms. These had been laid down at Church councils during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, above all at the Stoglav Council of This 'Council of a Hundred Chapters' produced a lengthy document in the form of answers to problems besetting many areas of Church life.

In the later 17th century and early 18th, the chief ideologists of Old Ritualism included such well-known figures in Russian history as the Archpriest Awakum , the deacon Feodor d. A fair amount has been written about the connection between the venerated image and religious experience, but most of it in the form of studies of ancient, Byzantine or Old Russian art. This is true too of the Russian icon of the 18th century and later. This situation, I suggest, not only allows, it positively encourages the exploration of fresh topics and perspectives, the more so since they can build on the rather broad theoretical base laid down by published work on the theory and semiotics of the icon, and on the theory of the visual image.

A growing interest in problems of mentalites makes modern cultural history turn all the more readily to the analysis of spiritual life, to the study of the invariant, stable structures of consciousness, to its deepest layers - to the mentality that reflects the historical experience of a nation. It is here that we can capture the system of 'automatic responses' of the collec- tive mind-set, its images and concepts, which is determined by culture, language, religion and social life, and which is the regulator of behaviour or, so to speak, the existence-in-the-world of one or another people.

Scholarship in these fields can help us understand the particular nature of icon venera- tion and the characteristics of mass religiosity. The icon, as symbol of the Incarnation the 'heart' of Orthodoxy , was always capable of subtly registering and reflecting the most complex rhythms of historical reality. In the Byzantine theory of the image, two major func- tions of the icon stand out: The first function was explained at the Seventh Ecumenical Council the Second Council of Nicaea, held in , which identified the need to portray the lives of saints in such a way that their labours and deeds should be made known to the people - and to humble people in particular.

Thus the belief of the Fathers of the Church that an icon is a 'book for the illiterate' was affirmed. In the resolutions of the Council it was emphasized that, the more that 'with the help of the icons' Jesus Christ, the Mother of God, the angels and the saints become the object of our contemplation, so much the more are those who behold these icons moved to the recollection of their prototypes, do they acquire more love for them, are they moved to kiss, to respect and to reverence them, but on no account to render them that true worship which, according to our faith, is proper to the Divine Being alone.

That was the basis on which the second highly important function of the Orthodox image was established: Defending the icons of the saints, St John Damascene, a major 8th-century opponent of iconoclasm, underlined their grace-bestowing action on individuals, since the active effect of the Holy Spirit on the living world also corresponded to the presence of grace in the icon. The Orthodox icon not only could clarify the plan of the Creator but, being 'constructive', could also bring it about.

This transmission through the icon of the hypostasis of 'personality' and also of the 'personality' of the sanctified human being - the saint also determined the active effect of the icon on humanity and the 'world'. Hence the icon could occupy its own very special space within the history of consciousness and culture, while the people's attitudes to the icon could include historically formed stereotypes capable of casting light both on the shaped and the unconscious historical experience.

From this starting-point my task was to use primary sources to demon- strate the peculiarities of the Russian ontology of the icon - in other words to attempt to see the 'life', the existence of the icon in the longue duree or 'Great Time' of Russian consciousness. This way of posing the problem has effectively excluded any aesthetic evaluation of the icon, or rather it has shifted aesthetic criteria to a secondary level and replaced them with the scrutiny of religious sensibilities and patterns of consciousness within the general lines of Russian cultural development.

Thus in Icon and Devotion the reader will not find exhaustive descriptions of iconography, or of the various styles and 'schools' of Russian icon painting of and since the 18th century. Nor will the reader find any finished picture of the evolution of Old Russian painting or of the development of its traditions. Instead of a chronological account of the history of icon painting in Imperial Russia, the reader will discover a rather mosaic-like picture formed from distinct subjects, stories, descriptions, disruptions and typologies that show various temporary characteristics, which in their totality are subordinated to my construction of a typological cultural model.

This model's purpose is related to an evident feature or theme of Russian life - the fact that a huge number of icons are to be found in its cultural-historical space. The model should explain how behind this theme or state of affairs , which initially seems devoid of significance, there exists a deep and complex but entirely real field of study. This involves one particular, historically defined configuration of ideas and common concepts that comes to the fore: Various scholars have explored the consequences on Russia's history of the conception of 'Moscow, the Third Rome' and the ideal image of 'Holy Russia'.

At a certain point in the formation of the popular mentality, a particular assortment of Utopian values, images and signs was assimilated, and this lived on in spite of all subsequent historical change. Already in the world view of the abbot of Pskov monastery, the Elder Filofey, the concept of the final stage of the universal 'transmission of Imperial power' translatio imperii and the discovery by Rus of special charisma emerged as the chief foundation of his cultural conception.

The famous eschatological quality of his idea revealed itself thus: So know, thou lover of God and of Christ, that all the Christian king- doms have come to an end and have been united into the single tsardom of our ruler, according the prophetic books, and that this is the Tsardom of Russia: Unbelief is as water; see, chosen one of God, how all the Christian kingdoms have been drowned by the faithless ones, and how only the single Tsardom of our one ruler stands by the grace of God. This collective religious feeling was not only accepted, but taken over with ease: Following the Byzantine model, Muscovite Russia began to conceive of itself as no more or less than the unique and God-chosen state, possessor both of the chief symbols of sacred power and of the main single symbol of Orthodox faith - the icon.

The concept of 'tsardom' i. This value system lived and moved within the longue duree of the history of consciousness, spreading over those depths where, as followers of the Annales school of history conceive, super-slow movements of ideas and speculative constructs take place, where the kernel of the collective uncon- scious is formed, in which archetypal ideas are self-generating.

Embracing the most varied, sometimes quite incompatible, forms, these super-slow movements perpetually emerge as if 'in dialogue' with factual history 'Little Time' breaking through culture's surface, revealing themselves thereby as a powerful organizer of new cultural structures and phenomena. It was on such a wave of cultural disturbance that the religious culture of the 'Old Belief developed: The active working-out in Muscovite Russia of the idea of 'sacred empire' and of the link between holiness and ethno-cultural space became, in Imperial Russia, a sharp polar- ization of religious experience, which gave birth to the peculiarities - unique in modern times - of icon veneration and of the way icons formed part of popular culture.

The attitude of everyday consciousness towards the icon entered into a complex inner relationship with the ideal model of 'Holy Russia' and world consciousness generally, since the common 'religious storehouse' of collective purposes and system of feelings was also the foun- dation on which both various types of devotion and the various sign-systems of the venerated image would arise. The spiritual moment of dislocation connected with the early 16th-century struggle between the Josephites styazhateli, 'Possessors' , who believed it appropriate that monasteries enrich themselves as landowners, and their more ascetic opponents, the Non-Possessors, has of course given rise to a vast literature.

Most specialists have come to the conclusion that the victory of the adherents of Joseph of Volokolamsk over the followers of Nil Sorsky led to the consolidation in the Russian church of a certain ritualized severity and confessionalism. However, perhaps only Georgiy Florovsky clearly discerned the inner link between the innovativeness of the Josephites in the matter of icons, and changes in mass religious sensibilities and in attitudes to the icons.

The argument between the high-ranking civil servant Ivan Viskovatiy and the Metropolitan Makariy in concerning religious painting was described by Florovsky as 'a collision of religious-aesthetic orientations: Viskovatiy' s standpoint, that 'it is not proper to revere the image beyond truth', was rejected the moment that the religious masses themselves were drawn into the internal quarrel between the Josephites and the Non-Possessors, whereupon there was a polarization within the common people.

In parallel with the switch of spiritual life to an externalized regu- lated piety there takes place a switch towards externality in art too. The dogmatic content of an image begins to lose its dominant significance and is no longer always sensed as fundamental.

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The enthusiasm for good appearance and good order typical of Josephism stimulate quantity at the expense of quality. The icon as religious symbol always displays a mystical connection of the earthly with the heavenly: The vast quantity of icons in Russia that revealed signs of the heavenly world in the earthly aimed not only to 'reflect' sacred history but actively to influence the collective consciousness: The history of Russian icon production turned out to be closely linked with the development of the theory of 'Moscow the Third Rome' and with the formation in the unconscious historical experi- ence of an artificially constructed and speculative model of 'Holy Russia'.

In order to demonstrate the general dependence of icon production in Imperial Russia on collective religiosity, I have focused my attention not so much on 'high' culture - the religious painting of the Imperial Academy of Arts - but rather on lower, everyday culture, and more specifically on the well-known popular icons of 'Suzdalian painting' from Palekh, Mstyora and Kholuy.

I hope to convince the reader that in the 18th and 19th centuries these three villages were the leading centres of large-scale icon-painting in the Orthodox world. Once upon a time they were part of the Suzdal principality thereafter they fell within the Vladimir governership , but the adjective 'Suzdaliarf was attached to them and became their general name. It is enough to mention that, according to statistics from the mid- and later 19th century, in the single village of Kholuy between 1.

These incredible amounts are not some exceptional historical case: Communicating a particular ontological closeness to the Godhead, these millions of icons made the space surrounding a person resemble a kind of 'icon', the image of a 'realized eschatology of 'Holy Russia'.

Since Icon and Devotion is the very first attempt at a comprehensive cultural-historical approach to this complicated and uninvestigated subject- matter, its aim is not so much to answer questions as to pose them as clearly as possible, by bringing into the scholarly realm new documentary and illustrative materials, most of them published here for the first time. In juxtaposing these with 'older', doubtless generally known, materials, I trust that the latter will seem all the more resonant.

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This has also determined the book's structure. Each of its two parts is devoted to a single theme, which, even if discursive, is internally connected with the main problem. In Part One, general questions of the history of religious sensibilities and of the veneration of icons are discussed, chiefly on the level of everyday culture.

But while I describe and analyse facts taken from the most varied sources, I have attempted to delineate them through the outlines of 'great' history, pinpointing their meaning in the context of the model to which I have already referred. The history of Imperial Russia is traditionally taken to begin with the foundation of the northern capital, St Petersburg, in , and to end with the abdication of Nicholas II on 15 March However, so as to observe the invariant structures of consciousness, it has proved essential to take the history of culture in its most varied temporal forms, that is, to use time as a 'means of observation'.

To put it in another way, I chose a method that would provide not only a description of monuments, but also the juxtaposition of experiences, a perpetual comparison, some- times even prioritizing an examination of 'one's own' and 'others'. What seems ordinary to us is seen by others in quite another light. The history of icon painting is inseparable from the history of icon veneration; thus between these two histories there must be some sort of invisible but very real and extensive common ground on which the meeting of ideas and feelings with everyday life, with actual reality, takes place.

In Palekh, Mstyora and Kholuy, icons were painted that answered to the generally accepted norms both of the official cult and of the Old Belief. This universality of the Suzdal industry, its close connection with popular religious life, enables us to examine the icon business of Imperial Russia in close-up, and to find points of contact between the super-slow move- ments of ordinary forms of existence, drawn into the current with the kind of history that can be termed 'eventful', i. The religious and moral systems of devotion determined not only the place of icons and their production in worship, but also the particularities of their artistic language, their subject-matter and iconographic themes.

In this sense the sign system of the venerated image faithfully reflected both changes in religious philosophy and the general orientation of one or other types of culture. For that reason, as I analyze the working principles of icon-painting craftsmen and the artistic life of the icon, I have tried not to separate it from the universal mechanisms of low' culture, or of the peculiarities of religious sensibility and the 'rules of faith'.

In the Imperial Russian period, the art of the icon developed primarily on the lower level of popular craft culture; it was the sort of mass craft industry typical of modern times, precisely that 'low-level cultural store' gesunkenes Kulturgut that German ethnography had identified by the beginning of the 20th century as a genetic result of the separation of culture into learned and profane spheres at the end of the Middle Ages.

Thus, as I examine the laws and mechanisms of the formation of the Russian icon- painting craft from the 18th century to the early 20th, I have tried to emphasize their universal significance for the world of Orthodox culture that Ricardo Picchio named Slavia Orthodoxa, a concept he developed in the s to describe the common cultural elements of all Slav peoples of Orthodox faith.

Beyond that, the typological model I have set up often comes into direct conflict with ordinary Christian culture and its urge towards unity and autonomy from subjective systems of devotion. Hence arises the unavoidable comparison between 'high' and 'low' art: With all this in mind, and without in any way pretending to any universal or unconditional quality in my observations, comparisons or conclusions it is clear that reality is always more complicated than any model , I have none the less tried to show that the artistic structure of the mass-produced craft icon could reflect profound and historically determined collective values, something particularly evident in any consideration of the fate of the national culture as a whole.

The publication of this book in English owes much to the cooperation of several British scholars, in the first place Professor Robin Cormack and Professor Stephen Bann, to whom I am deeply indebted. My special thanks to Professor Robin Milner-Gulland, who undertook the difficult task of translating it into English and editing it. I also wish to thank Gordon Lankton and Alexander Tumanov for their sincere interest in, and support for, this translation.

I am most grateful to friends and colleagues for advice and comments they made both during the writing of the book and after its completion: My final thanks are to my photographer in Moscow, Victor Solomatin, and to the staff at Reaktion Books. The world is an incorruptible raiment. Russian folk saying Previous page: Appearance of the Icon of the Mother of Cod to Avraamiy of Calich, of the 17th century or early 18th. The Sacred in the Everyday Icons are so ordered that everything depicted in them is presented in its own ontology.

Their makers took much trouble to distort the phenomenal world profoundly with a special reverse perspectival scheme, whereby parallel lines are represented as diverging from, rather than converging on, a distant vanishing-point beyond the picture space. But we should note that when a person surrounds him- or herself with icons in the quite literal sense, a reverse mirror effect can easily arise: The Russian world had always diligently saturated itself with signs of holiness; interpenetrating, the real and semiotic levels 'worked' in a certain direction: The deep-rooted mental construct 'Holy Russia' was the major influence in Moscow's well-known desire to become a home-bred Byzantium: For that reason, from the very start of the construction of this empire the icon was a founding element of the Muscovite way of life, one that left deep traces in the subse- quent history of religious sensibilities.

The Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo, for example, an East Christian visitor to Moscow, has left us a mass of interesting infor- mation. In his memoir, The Journey of Patriarch Makarios ofAntioch to Russia in the Mid-iyth Century, he noted that 'In each house there is a countless multitude of icons, adorned with gold, silver and precious stones, and not only within houses, but also at all doors, even at house-gates, and this is true not only of Boyars, but of peasants in the villages, since their love and faith towards the icons is very great. The interior space the house and the exterior space the world were often constructed as if they made up one sacred space, a Great Icon, called on to symbolize no more nor less than Holy Russia, the special protection of Rus by heavenly powers, the ubiquity of Christ's image in it.

The house is one of the main symbolic manifestations of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. Holy Wisdom establishes harmony first of all in the world of the home: Hence in the Christian apprehension the home was always associated with the well-ordered and settled world, fenced in from 'chaos'. Meanwhile the word 'paradise' acquired a special modality: Thus in the mid-i6th-century volume Domostroy 'Book of Household Management' by Silvester, a priest at the Annunciation Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin, we read that in the actual domestic microcosm only an ideal orderliness is admissable.

He compares the Russian household with paradise itself as a little model of the universe. In this connection Domostroy recommended placing icons in every room - a practice that Paul of Aleppo found suprising. As we read there, Each Christian must, in all the rooms, hang by seniority holy images, adorning them beautifully, and place light-holders in which candles are to be lit during prayers in front of the holy images, and are then extinguished after the service, are covered with 38 THE ICON AND THE WORLD a curtain for the sake of cleanliness from dust, for correct order and for their preservation.?

A century later Paul of Aleppo recorded that In each Russian cell there is an icon screen with images, and not only within, but also outside, above the door, even above the stair- case door, for such is the custom among the Muscovites, that they hang icons on all doors of their houses, their cellars, their kitchens and their store-room.

But in the houses of those who had the opportunity, or were sufficiently rich, the 'main corner' was turned into a domestic church - a 'prayer-place' or oratory. Again it is Paul of Aleppo who first gives us a detailed description of it, later followed up by the 19th-century Russian historian I. As Paul says, 'In each of their houses there is a marvellous, elegant church, and each person boasts to others of its beauty and its outer and inner paintings. One wall of it [i. But what is an icono- stasis from the theological point of view? It acts both as the framing for the altar-space and as a window into the world of heavenly beings.

We know that somewhere around the Byzantine templon an openwork altar- rail was transformed in Rus into a continuous wall of icons. This wall separates the congregation from observing the action of the liturgy: Iconostasis of Annunciation Cathedral, Moscow Kremlin. Hence the Russian high iconostasis was also perceived as no less than the 'window on Heaven', about which Pavel Florensky authoritatively wrote almost a century ago.

This means we have a definite basis for regarding the evolution of the iconostasis in the context of the individual- ization of religious sensibility and personal veneration. By the second half of the 16th century, multi- tiered iconostases were appearing in Rus, and not only in the churches, but in homes as well. These so-called 'domestic iconostases' were in the form of folding panels. Their iconographic programme could contain a series of local icons, a full Deisis, tiers of the feast days, prophets and patriarchs, though these tiers were not always present.

People took folding iconostases with them on long journeys and on military expeditions. These domestic iconostases gave the impression of a scaled-down church iconostasis illus. Their type is that of an Andachtsbild - that is, a personal image for medita- tion of the kind that spread over Western Europe within the system of the 'New Devotion' in the 14th century.

When opened up, Russian folding icons, like an Andachtsbild, could look like the cross-section of a place of worship; when folded they resembled its portal, or the 'royal gates' in an iconostasis. Thus people could see before them the 'door' to a place of worship, open it and find themselves at once in a world of angels and saints; 9 there they could be alone and face-to-face with God.

Folding icon with 15 scenes representing an iconostasis, 19th century. Iconostasis, first half of the 19th century. Earlier, such 'playing' with the sacred space would have been largely limited to the Church; but in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was moving into the home. Thus the mental reduction of the distance between God and the world led to the demand for personal possession of a multi-tiered iconostasis, or rather of its scaled-down model. People entering a domestic place of worship had to feel that they were almost in Paradise see illus. Immediately before their eyes was a large, high iconostasis, and on the walls its smaller model and icons within shrines.

Moreover, in Russia in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the representation of a high iconostasis on a single board transformed it into a personal prayer image illus. The individual segments of the sanctified space of the oratory were united by the Holy Word - oral and written. Orally it resounded at the time of prayer, while in written form it was inscribed on a special board set into the frame and located on the wall beside the icons.

Such 'prayers' on boards were often written for Tsar Aleksey Mihkhaylovich by court artists and writers, for example Ivan Saltanov and Polikarp Fomin. The Old Ritualist oratory molennaja , late-igth-century photograph. At the beginning of the 20th century there was a huge quantity of icons in the Imperial chambers and oratories.

As in the 17th-century 'Golden Age' of Muscovite piety, icons almost entirely covered the walls of rooms. Thus the 'Plan of the Locations of Images and Icons in the Former Bedchambers of their Imperial Highnesses in the Great Kremlin Palace' indicates 40 icons in the Emperor's bedroom alone, though we have every reason to believe that not all are listed, since some of them have such high sequential numbers , , etc.

Icons hung on both sides of the bed; overall, images of the Mother of God the Smolensk, Iviron, Feodorov, Jerusalem and Vladimir variants predominated, and there were also many Russian saints, above all those canonized at councils in Ivan the Terrible's time: A wall of icons that staggers the imagination has been transferred from a church into a secular building - losing its unified, elegant and dogmatic conception in the process. Instead we have a programme of personal devotion, based on the idea of intercession and on just the same mystical juxtaposition of Heaven and earth.

In this way the age of Nicholas II gives a considerable insight into the earlier period of Tsar Aleksey Mikhaylovich, as it does into Russian history as a whole. It is no accident that the mid-i7th century was then regarded, under the influ- ence of the historian P. Milyukov, as the period of the 'fullest flowering of national ideals'. The choice of saints, the huge quantity of icons, and particularly their 'tapestry-like' location on the walls of the Imperial cham- bers, exemplified that special attention to the icon with which the official theocratic Utopia of the last tsar was saturated.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the mental construct of 'Holy Russia' or of Rus as Great Icon had both a temporal and a spatial dimension. On the one hand 'Holy Russia' was understood as an ideal, a historical model of Russia. On the other hand it was taken in the context of the Slavophile myth to be an individual cultural-historical type, a special 'civiliza- tion' that by its nature was opposed to the West, i.

This renaissance was a matter of strengthening the weakened connexion between monarch and people. However, it is important to emphasize that, in this political context, the accent was placed on a metaphysical link, bringing politics and metaphysics close together. The official Russian religious art of the 18th and 19th centuries had broken with the Byzantine and Old Russian tradition; but at the beginning of the 20th century it turned to that tradition anew.

The Icon and Devotion : Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia by Oleg Tarasov (2004, Hardcover)

The Orthodox icon always represented a link between two worlds. Once again symbol coincided with meaning. So that the symbol might once again acquire forcefulness and function, it was essential to revive the medieval icon-painting canon. Only then could the small icons within the 'Great Icon' again symbolize God's favour towards the Russian lands, since from ancient times the external space was no less sacralized than the internal. Millions of icons, thousands of churches and hundreds of monasteries daily reminded people over the course of many centuries of the universal presence of the image of Christ in Holy Russia.

Bezobrazov has testified that, in the mid-igth century, at every crossroads scattered among the fields and the forests of Vladimir region one would chance on a chapel or a timber post bearing an icon, for 'here there is an incalculable multitude of such posts'. To put icons in the trunks of old trees was a distinctive feature of Russian piety: But they also sanctified 'cultural' space - gates, streets, the walls of houses, of fortresses and of strongpoints in towns and villages.

Here, as travellers observed, icons were placed at the most 'honoured' points. On the doors of churches, town gates, on streets and in market-places - everywhere Sigismund Herberstein, Antonio Possevino, Johan Pernstein and Adam Olearius saw icons, marvelling at their number and at the special respect paid to them. Several altars up to three, normally would often be constructed, with the aim of acquiring as much grace as possible for the believers. It is no accident that a sacred name is attached to it: Crucially, its doors were open day and night, presuming the endless dispensation of grace.

Given the believers' opposition between 'the holy and the most holy', believers would discern beyond the name 'New Jerusalem' the authentic, more real reality, in particular that which had been revealed to the author of the Apocalypse: And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride for her husband.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God' Revelation For exterior space a church or monastery was a 'higher' sign of holiness than a mere small icon.

People saw a concentration of holiness in the quantity of churches and monasteries, and in the 16th century rumours were current that Moscow contained 5, churches, monasteries and chapels. Nothing so excited foreign observers as the full pealing of bells on the eve of feast days or Sunday, for 'the earth trembled and the thunderous sound of bells rose to the heavens'.

On the upper cultural levels a different logic determined the model to be followed: In the process, attention began to be paid to the number of parochial households, to their ability to sustain a parish, and also this is very telling to the distance separating churches. The space of Rus, which had become Imperial Russia, was undergoing secularizing processes while it was becoming even more sacralized within the cultural milieu of the Old Belief, with many people continuing to live according to the rules of Muscovite devotion.

In greater contrast to the splendour of Holy Russia was the Orthodox 'Orient'. The remainder of the world of 'Slavia Orthodoxa' in the post- Byzantine period was experiencing not the 'burden of numbers' of holy objects, but rather a siege mentality arising from the need to survive within the space of the Muslim world: Pictures of ravaged monasteries and churches succeeded the once brilliant cultural-historical landscape of the former Byzantine lands.

From the 16th century, minarets - signs of the victory of Islam over Christianity- dominated this cultural-historical space. Islam forbade not only tall Christian churches, but even tall houses, 'sign of an arrogance that was hateful to it'. Not surprisingly, the impoverishment of Balkan church life continually affronted Russian travellers and scholars. Many facts testify to the destruction of places of worship and desecration of holy sites, their 'deconcentratiorf.

Part II consists of three chapters that draw a fascinating picture of the changing language of icon painting in the modern period the eighteenth — early twentieth centuries. It provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding the iconography of the period, defining it as a popular craft that creatively adopted the European Mannerist style. It deals with three groups of icons of the period: Based on foreign models, notably following the Mannerist style, the Russian painted icons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries unwittingly adopted a post-Tridentine didactism.

In the Muscovite period the Russian painters reworked western models within the framework of the Byzantine canon. In Imperial Russia, however, western models were openly quoted and imitated. Tarasov expertly provides examples of such borrowings: It no longer tried to ally symbol with meaning but rather provided a commentary on symbols. Metaphor has replaced metaphysics and the Western-style rhetoric has replaced mystery. The depiction of subject matter also suffered a dramatic change. Imitating the new canons developed by the Renaissance artists, the icon painters strived for a greater individualisation in the depiction of their characters.

The changes reflected the shift in the understanding of a person: At the same time, the shift in the representation of the royal person reflected a change in Russian statehood. While symbolic features of the saints became more personalised, royal portraits became more iconic, encouraging both the sacralisation and glorification of the royal person. Similarly, significant transformations were taking place in the representation of the landscape.

More precision and skills were needed in depicting particular locations and architectural structures.

Icon painters followed the fashions of the time: Landscape reminiscent of Salvator Rosa would appear on the icons depicting saints in wilderness. In the early twentieth century the depiction of landscape in icons had nationalistic uses: The icon painters also made use of other devices of Baroque culture, such as the incorporation of words and texts into the image, which served to strengthen the didactic aspect of the prayer image and, more generally, to elevate the role of reason in religious experience pp. New icons became saturated with heraldic signs, cartouches and emblems that integrated a motto, picture and an epigram.

Tarasov provides a compelling interpretation of the aesthetic and religious significance of these new elements, showing their didactic impulse. Chapter 5 looks into the world of the post-seventeenth-century Old Believer icon and tells a remarkable story of modern myth-making. While the changes in Old Believer icons were not as obvious as in the icons of the New Ritual, Tarasov makes it clear that a subtle transformation nevertheless took place.

The elements of true perspective, Baroque ornamentation and far from symbolic landscape can be found in Old Believer icons, too. Adoration of pre-Nikonian icons by bearded schismatics also gave rise to a fascinating phenomenon of counterfeit and stylised icons. Tarasov suggests that definitions of old styles used by icon-painters and later by specialists, such as the Stroganov, Moscow and Novgorod schools, were nothing other than nineteenth-century inventions.

The same can be said about the style of icon painting attributed to Andrey Rublev, the medieval monk and icon painter, whose life is saturated with myths and legends. The Old Believers should thus be seen not as the guardians of the old iconographic tradition of medieval Russia, but as creators of the myth of Holy Russia which was a strikingly modern phenomenon. The last chapter serves as a conclusion and deals with two different phenomena:

• Gods Child
• Anastasia and the Mounted Regal Rescue
• It’s Christmas!: Whatever Happened to the Christmas Single?
• Spiderweb of Deceit
• Changes (Dark Corners)
• Of Deadly Descent - New Edition (Alex & Briggie Mysteries Book 2)
• Signals from the Soul: How Our Soul Tells Us What We Need to Know