The plot of Nikolai Leskov’s famous short story, Zapechatlennyi angel (The Sealed Angel), centres on an icon of a Guardian Angel, painted in the 16th century by the Stroganov school and the most venerated of a large number of icons in the possession of a group of priestless Old Believers employed to build a bridge under the direction of an Englishman, James Jameson. In this tale Jameson and his wife develop a sympathetic interest in ancient icon-painting. Leskov first published The Sealed Angel in the January 1873 issue of the Russian Messenger.1 Later the same year, An Art Tour to Northern Capitals of Europe by Joseph Beavington Atkinson appeared. Atkinson was an art critic who inter alia wrote two books on English painters. His attitude to the religious art in general, and icons in particular, which he encountered in Russia oscillated between the unsympathetic and the downright hostile.
This is a sample:
Here in the cathedrals of the Kremlin […] I observed, what I had long noted in Munich, that the modern art, which aims to be true in its drawing and grammatical in its construction, has much less spell over the multitude than the so-called miraculous pictures, though coarse and common as sign-boards. One of such works, the Holy Virgin of Vladimir, said, of course, to have been painted by St. Luke, and now absolutely black, and with features obliterated, receives, as one of the most ancient images in Russia, countless kisses and genuflexions. Here is an instance where Mr. Ruskin’s ‘lamp of
I am indebted to Tony Cross for his very helpful comments on this text. Also to Wendy Salmond who kindly read a draft and provided some valuable corrections.
1 Nikolai Leskov, The Sealed Angel and Other Stories, ed. and trans. K.A Lantz (Knoxville, TN, 1984), pp. 5-72.
sacrifice’—a precept fine in humanity but false in art—is made to burn most brightly […] No reasonable being will contend that this is art: nothing further need be said, for this one example represents the whole.2
Fig. 4.1 Mother of God of Vladimir icon (before 1918). Kremlin
Museums.
Fig. 4.2 Mother of God of Vladimir icon, after cleaning and removal
of oklad. Tretyakov Gallery.
Here we have utterly divergent assessments of British attitudes to Russian icons in Victorian times expressed simultaneously by a Russian novelist and an English critic. Which of them most accurately reflects British perceptions of these objects at the time? 1873 marks almost the halfway point in the period this paper covers—the 100 years between c.1830 and 1930. The rationale behind this date-span is that it post-dates the Enlightenment, which in respect of western responses to Russian icons—and Orthodoxy as a culture—has attracted scholarly attention;3 the terminus ante is the exhibition of Russian icons held at the Victoria and Albert Museum at the end of 1929 and the book on the subject published
2 John Beavington Atkinson, An Art Tour to Northern Capitals of Europe (London, 1873), pp.
243-4.
3 Larry Wolff, The Enlightenment and the Orthodox World (Athens, 2001).
Russian Icons 71 soon afterwards under the title Masterpieces of Russian Painting. Together they mark a seminal moment in British experience of icon-painting.4 (Figs.
5, 6) To cover a century invites generalisation, and it is impossible to do more than open up the subject to further and more detailed research.
Until the end of the period under consideration, to all intents and purposes Russian icons could only be experienced in Russia. A rare instance of an icon being brought to England is the 18th-century St Nicholas icon presented in 1834 to Christ Church College Oxford by William Fox-Strangways, later 4th Earl of Ilchester, a noted collector of early Italian paintings who had served as an attaché at the British Embassy in St Petersburg.5
Fig. 4.3 St Nicholas icon (18th century), Christ Church College, Oxford.
4 Russian Ikon Exhibition (Victoria & Albert Museum, 18 November-14 December 1929);
Ancient Russian Icons (Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition Catalogue, 1929); Michael Farbman (ed.), Masterpieces of Russian Painting (London, 1930).
5 I am indebted to Dr Georgi Parpulov for bringing this icon to my attention.
Those who travelled in Russia and left records of their impressions were for the most part drawn from the upper strata of society: diplomats and aristocrats like Fox-Strangways, gentry, clergy and army and naval officers.
Into the last category falls Captain C. Colville Frankland RN, who visited Russia in 1830-1. His comments on the icon of the Mother of God of Vladimir in Moscow are very similar to those of Beavington Atkinson forty years later:
This cathedral boasts of a Virgin… painted by St Luke […] This black ill-looking idol is decorated with a superb solitaire, valued at 80,000 roubles:
the frame containing her ladyship’s portrait is estimated at 200,000 more.
Money badly spent, thought I. There are so many holy pictures of Saints, Martyrs, etc. here, miraculous as well as ludicrous, that I cannot attempt to name them.6 (Fig. 4.1)
Much the same tone is evident in the observations of Edward Pett Thompson, who travelled in Russia in 1848. Whilst acknowledging the splendour of the iconostasis in the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin, his description of the Mother of God of Vladimir icon was followed by this dismissive remark:
The number of these miraculous pictures in Russia is quite inconceivable, and the readiest faith is bestowed on them although the priests, like their heathen brethren of old, themselves prepare the fraud, to which it is impossible that they can be dupes […].7
Thompson had aesthetic as well as religious objections to the visual manifestations of the Orthodox faith:
[…] the Greek church prostrates itself before pictures which are a libel on humanity, and much more on a saint. I can imagine fanaticism bowing before the sublime conception of a Thorwaldsen, or worshipping the representations of a Murillo or a Raphael, but I cannot conceive the genuineness of even mistaken devotion when its objects are either a caricature or a burlesque […].8
The skepticism evinced by Frankland and Thompson was consonant with the critical stance taken by western observers of the Enlightenment and even earlier, notably Giles Fletcher (1591) and Samuel Collins (1671)—the latter describing Russian icons as ‘very pitiful painting, flat and ugly, after
6 Captain C. Colville Frankland, Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of Russia and Sweden in the Years 1830 and 1831, II (London, 1832); extract published in Moscow. A Travellers’
Companion, selected and intro. by Laurence Kelly (London, 1983), p. 121.
7 Edward Pett Thompson, Life in Russia: or, The Discipline of Despotism (London, 1848), p.
8 Ibid., p. 273.272.
Russian Icons 73 the Greek manner’.9 Collins’s dismissive remarks about the quality and nature of Russian painting were echoed a century later by the Rev. John Glen King, who served as Chaplain to the British Factory in St Petersburg, in his The Rites and Ceremonies of the Greek Church in Russia:
It might be expected that valuable paintings should also make a part of the riches of a church, in which religious pictures are not only an indispensable ornament, but are necessary in its worship […] but though the number of these pictures is so great, and though religion was the cause which called forth such excellency and perfection in painting and sculpture in popish countries […] yet the same cause has not been so lucky as to produce one good painter or one capital picture in Russia: on the contrary these are the most wretched dawbings that can be conceived, some of them notwithstanding are said to be the work of angels.10
The aesthetic sensibilities of King were framed by the conventions of contemporary taste, expressed within an Anglican theological context, as the book’s dedication (to George III) makes clear: ‘One reflection of great moment […] arises from the similarity between the burthensome ceremonies of the Greek and the Romish church […] whence every protestant may learn to set a just value on that reformation which is established in his own’.11
Whether clerical or lay, those British commentators who made observations on the quality of Russian icon-painting were (like Collins and King) nurtured within a Protestant ideology opposed to imagery and devotional gestures associated with it. Even in the case of Beavington Atkinson, who was writing from the point of view of an art critic, his
strictures were as much religious as aesthetic.
Such attitudes were not confined to Russia. As in the Enlightenment, the antipathy towards the visual manifestations of Russian religious practices and beliefs applied to Eastern Christianity as a whole. The discourse was that of a superior faith which deemed the culture of Orthodoxy in its various manifestations to be ignorant and idolatrous and hence belonging to the world of the Other.12 Here, for example, is the dismissive comment of the Rev. John Hartley, who travelled in the newly independent Greek state and
9 Samuel Collins, A Survey of the Present State of Russia and Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth, in Marshall Poe (ed.), Early Exploration of Russia, I (London, 2003), p. 88 (see also pp. 410, 411, 421-2).
10 John Glen King, The Rites and Ceremonies of the Greek Church, in Russia (London, 1772), p. 33.
11 Ibid. (dedication page); for British taste in this period, see Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (London, 1976).
12 Wolff, Enlightenment; Robin Cormack, ‘“A Gentleman’s Book”: Attitudes of Robert Curzon’, in Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys (eds.), Through the Looking Glass.
the Ottoman Empire for the Church Missionary Society in 1826 and 1828:
‘These objects of religious regard [i.e. icons] are, invariably, most wretched performances, destitute of all taste and beauty’.13 The archaeologist/explorer Austen Henry Layard, although well-disposed to the Nestorian Christians he encountered in present-day Iraq, took the same line as Hartley when it came to their religious images: ‘[…] the hideous pictures, and monstrous deformities which encumber the churches of Mosul’.14
Not everyone though, even in the early 19th century, danced to this negative tune. The Rev. Robert Pinkerton, who visited Eastern Europe and Russia on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society, published in 1814 a description of Russian churches, their frescoes, iconostases and principal icons which was largely free from value-judgments, apart from a passing comment that they were ‘overloaded with decorations’—and a social distinction. At the end of a lengthy exposition by Metropolitan Platon on Orthodox theology, which comprises the major part of the book, Pinkerton comments that the illiterate peasants were unable to comprehend the dogma on icon veneration, ‘[…] observing the idolatrous ideas which thousands of them actually entertain about the pictures and powers of departed saints’.15 Robert Curzon, later 14th Baron Zouche, who travelled extensively through the Ottoman Empire during the 1830s, while asserting that Byzantine and Coptic art lacked the ‘purity and angelic expression so much to be admired in the works of Beato Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, and other early Italian masters’, also acknowledged that ‘the earlier Greek artists in their conceptions of the personages of Holy Writ sometimes approached the sublime’.16
From the middle of the century a positive attitude becomes more widespread, a by-product of the emergence of the ritualist movement within the Church of England. In 1850 John Mason Neale, one of the founders of the Cambridge Camden Society and a High Churchman, published A History of the Holy Eastern Church; although only a brief section is devoted to a description of an iconostasis, the tone throughout is anything but hostile.17
Byzantium through British Eyes (Papers from the 29th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, London, March 1995) (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 147-59.
13 John Hartley, Researches in Greece and the Levant (2nd edn London, 1833), p. 55.
14 Austen Henry Layard, A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh (London, 1851), p. 143.
15 Robert Pinkerton, The Present State of the Greek Church in Russia (Edinburgh, 1814), pp. 22, 16 Robert Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (London, 1849), pp. 299-300. For Curzon, 231.
see also Ian Fraser, The Heir of Parham: Robert Curzon 14th Baron Zouche (Harleston, 1986).
17 John Mason Neale, A History of the Holy Eastern Church (London, 1850), pp. 191-202.
Russian Icons 75 Just over a decade later appeared Lectures on the Eastern Church; its author, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster, was less of a ritualist than
Neale but shared his interest in Orthodoxy. Like Neale, his work spanned the Orthodox world, but he had observed the Russian church at first-hand during a stay in Moscow. Prefacing his remarks with a Russian proverb he saw displayed at a residence of Metropolitan Platon (‘Let not him who comes in here carry out the dirt that he finds within’) did not inhibit Stanley from indulging in ethnic superiority when it came to defining the nature of Russian Orthodox religious practice: ‘[…] the great Empire of which we are speaking, if it has not been civilised, has unquestionably been kept alive, by its religious spirit’.
Notwithstanding this exercise in Otherness, Stanley invokes neither superstition nor idolatry in his account. He observes that icons are at the core of the Russian faith and sees them as didactic as well as sacred: ‘[…]
a passion for pictures, not as works of art but as emblems, as lessons, as instructions, is thus engendered and multiplied in common life beyond all example elsewhere’. He also underlines the place of miracle-working icons like the Mother of God of Vladimir in Russian history and identity: ‘And when we remember that some of these pictures have beside their interest as the emblems of truth to a barbarian and child-like people, acquired the historical associations involved in the part they have taken in great national events, it is not surprising that the combination of religious and patriotic feelings […] should have raised their veneration to a pitch to us almost inconceivable’.18 This more enlightened approach is evident in the second edition of Curzon’s Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, published in 1865. By then he had read Alphonse Didron’s translation of the Painter’s Manual by Dionysios of Fourna; the result was the inclusion of a passage in the Introduction which showed greater familiarity with the conventions governing Orthodox iconography. Curzon understood the devotional rather than the purely aesthetic appeal of (Greek) Orthodox images:
They are all painted in the stiff conventional manner which tradition has handed down from remote antiquity. No one who has had the opportunity of improving his good taste by a careful study of these ancient works of art can fail to appreciate and reverence that high and noble spirit which animated the pencils of those saintly painters, and irradiates the composition of their sublime conceptions with a dignity and grandeur which is altogether
18 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (London and Oxford, 1861), pp. viii, 341, 362, 365.
wanting in the beautiful pictures of Rubens, Titian, Guido, Domenichino, and other great artists of more mundane schools.19
Most of the British commentators discussed so far were men of the cloth and their books were primarily intended for a pious readership, hence the interest in icons as religious artefacts. Already, however, by the middle of the 19th century the taste for foreign travel had given rise to the expansion of the guidebook genre aimed at a wider public. The most enduring and prominent of these was the series of red handbooks produced by the publishing house of John Murray (whose imprint included Visits to Monasteries in the Levant)—the authors of which were almost entirely drawn from outside the ranks of the clergy.20 The firm published a handbook for Russia as early as 1839, edited by Thomas Denman Whatley and with information on Russia supplied by Layard, who had visited the country in the previous year. In 1848 the first edition of the Handbook for Northern Europe appeared, under the editorship of Captain W. Jesse. The Russian section was largely confined to St Petersburg, Moscow and their environs, but as communications improved with the construction of railways, in subsequent editions more places became accessible and were included (although the focus remained on the two main cities).
As with the entire series, the Handbook for Northern Europe has a factual description of the principal historical, architectural and artistic attractions.
Icons are rarely specifically listed, except for those on the iconostases of the most important churches and those deemed to be miracle-working, including of course the Mother of God of Vladimir with its ‘dark, almost black’
face.21 (Fig. 4.1) Several expanded, revised and up-dated editions were published from 1865 onwards, all by Thomas Michell, FRGS, an attaché at the British Embassy in St Petersburg. The later versions incorporated material provided by others, but as Michell points out in the 1868 edition, it was ‘the result of personal travel and observation during a residence of many years in Russia’.22 As with all of the series, the later editions are more impersonal, with the eschewing of negative value-judgments found in the earlier volumes, such as the characterization of the frescoes in the principal
19 Robert Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (2nd edn, London, 1865), p. 34; see also Cormack, ‘“A Gentleman’s Book”’, p. 158.
20 I am indebted to Tony Cross for information on the early Murray’s handbooks to Russia.
For the series in a wider context see John Vaughan, The English Guide Book c.1780-1870 (Newton Abbot, 1974), esp. Chapter 2.
21 Handbook for Northern Europe, II (new edn, London, 1849), p. 544.
22 Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland and Finland (2nd revised edn, London, 1868), p. vi.
Russian Icons 77 church of the Donskoi monastery as ‘miserable productions’.23 They are often more detailed, as in the case of the description of the Mother of God of Vladimir icon, where the reference to the opaque face is replaced by a brief account of its origins in Constantinople and subsequent history in Russia. Observation in conjunction with familiarity with Russia’s historical treasures is exactly what the Handbooks comprise. Although they rarely attract scholarly attention, their significance in disseminating information on a little-known country in an easily digestible form should not be overlooked; for long they were a sine qua non for British travellers.
Notwithstanding the Handbooks, there is little evidence that Russian icons, any more than Byzantine or post-Byzantine ones, made any impact on Victorian Britain. The Rev. William Sparrow Simpson, an antiquary and historian of Old St Paul’s Cathedral, published two articles in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association for 1867 and 1869. They were not, however, concerned with painted icons but with what he labelled ‘Russo-Greek portable icons of brass’, in other words the small cast-metal icons which were made in vast quantities during the 18th and 19th centuries, especially by Old Believer communities.24
Fig. 4.4 Cast-metal and enamel Old Believer cross (19th century).
Private collection
23 Handbook for Northern Europe, II (new edn, London, 1849), p. 557; Vaughan, English Guide Book, p. 47.
24 W. Sparrow Simpson, ‘Russo-Greek Portable Icons of Brass’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, XXII (1867), pp. 113-23, idem, XXV (1869), pp. 179-85. For these artefacts see Neizvestnaia Rossiia. K 300-letiiu Vygovskoi staroobriadtsesskoi pustyni (State Historical Museum exhibition catalogue, Moscow, 1994), pp. 37-58; Richard Eighme Ahlborn and Vera Beaver-Bricken Espinola (eds.), Russian Copper Icons and Crosses from the Kunz Collection: Castings of Faith (Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology, LI, 1991).
Sparrow Simpson’s interest in these artefacts came about as a result of the Crimean War, when a number of them found their way to England, either taken from the bodies of dead Russian soldiers by their British counterparts or from prisoners of war held in Lewes gaol. Although fifty years previously the Rev. Pinkerton had noted that the Vyg Old Believer community was a centre for the production of cast-metal icons, and although they had
Sparrow Simpson’s interest in these artefacts came about as a result of the Crimean War, when a number of them found their way to England, either taken from the bodies of dead Russian soldiers by their British counterparts or from prisoners of war held in Lewes gaol. Although fifty years previously the Rev. Pinkerton had noted that the Vyg Old Believer community was a centre for the production of cast-metal icons, and although they had