Portrait, 4th century. Národní galerie v Praze, Prague.
The history of the Russian icon must begin with its original source, its most ancient prototype. As we shall see, the Byzantine icon, the model which the Russians adopted with Christianity, has left very few surviving examples and so, having lost its own history, can scarcely furnish a basis for the history of the Russian icon. It is unlikely that ancient Kiev received its icons directly from Byzance itself, with which it often lost touch owing to the Nomad barrier. To Kiev things came mainly from Chersonesus Taurica: we find both at Chersonesus and at Kiev identical objects of the tenth to twelfth centuries, bronze crosses, coloured tiles, glazed pottery, and the like.[15]
Chersonesus, a great commercial city, supplied ancient Russia with all kinds of goods from Asia Minor, exported through Sinope and Trebizond. The Grecian East was the true home of the icon; it arose there in the fourth century and spread abroad in the fifth. Fathers of the Church, such as S. John Chrysostom or Gregory of Nysa, already knew of it as an adjunct of the Christian faith. The icon was nothing new; it was born among the ordinary panel portraits of martyrs and confessors which were executed by the encaustic or wax process and laid either upon the coffins and sarcophagi or else upon definite shrines in martyria or memoriae.[16] When such palpable honour, done to the martyrs memory, was rendered as a portrait, it gave the wooden panel the sacred significance of the honoured icon.[17]
This early stage of the icon’s history is itself connected with an ancient custom where the ancient Egyptians prepared painted portraits of the dead and laid them so that they showed from underneath the mummy bands. In the early centuries of our era, the Alexandrian school of painting had reached sufficient artistic perfection to allow of the existence of many artistic firms ready to produce, quickly and cheaply, portraits of the most striking realism. The Egyptians, when they equipped the dead man for the life beyond the grave, thanks to the strength of the priestly code, kept close to primitive materialism and surrounded the ‘everlasting’ home of the dead man with everything that characterised his life on earth. This was necessitated by their belief that the soul, though it had escaped from the body, was still bound to it by indissoluble ties and needed these make-believe surroundings for its continued existence. Hence they set up stelae with representations of offerings made at the tomb, and of kinsfolk praying that the soul should attain the good things of this world and entrance to the heavenly mansions. In the latest period towards the Christian era the exact portrait of the deceased, identified with his double (ka), took its place in the grave, and retained the powers of a mystic and vivifying image which maintained the link between the departed soul and the deserted body preserved in the form of a mummy. The funeral furnishers enclosed the mummy in a papier-mâché case with a coloured mask of the dead man. Later they substituted for this his portrait in the flat, painted on a separate board either from the life or after death, but with all the features and appearance of life. The board was slipped inside the tight mummy bands over the face: the picture gives sometimes just the head, sometimes the beginnings of the shoulders or the full bust. Cemeteries with such mummies have been found in the sandy shores of dried-up lakes in the Fayum, at Antinopolis and elsewhere, and have yielded whole series of realistic portraits. They are done by the encaustic method, that is, by the manipulation of heated coloured wax with a spatula. In these realistic heads we at once can see a highly developed technique and journeyman execution. The features are undoubtedly individual, the colours rich and bright, but the touch in the curls is dry. Round the lady’s neck is a fine gold chain with an amulet. The portraits were executed hastily; the pats of coloured wax have not been thoroughly melted. A typical manner is common to them all, a tendency to make the face look young, to slur over the signs of age and even of full manhood. The eyes are emphasised, to produce the illusion of life.[18]
10. Christ Pantocrator, 6th century.
Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, Egypt.
11. Saint Peter, 6th century.
Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, Egypt.
The wax technique was chosen for the Egyptian portraits because it was the quickest process, but by its nature, it demanded great skill in the craftsman and was accordingly expensive. As a result, we also have a whole series of similar portraits executed either in tempera (a mixture of egg white and lime) or in the regular egg technique with the yolk as medium. Two such in the State Russian Museum merely show the heads: they are painted on oblong boards, the width being greater than the height. The icon of Ss. Sergius and Bacchus in Kiev Theological Academy is of this shape, as are icons represented in paintings and suchlike; they all reproduce the type of long-shaped icon laid upon a coffin or sarcophagus. These very ancient examples show the same manner of working as is still practised by Russian icon-painters. The ground colour is a dark brown, upon this the features are painted first in reddish ochre and then in light brown, so that the ground colour gives the shading and finally the lighted planes (modelé) and the highlights are done in ochre mixed with white lead or in pure white lead. These highlights can be found in the work of the Russian icon-painters, who call them blik (German Blick), ozhívka (from ozhivát to enliven), or dvízhka (from dvígaf to move); in French rehaut, reflet, lumière.
In the faces, the eyes are rendered with special emphasis and force, first by a deep shaded orbit and next by the bold relief of the forehead, brows, eyelids and thick lashes, and finally by putting in the pupil and the shining point of its centre (svêtik – little light). Characteristic of an icon is it that it should give no more than the bust of the saint, but that the clothing of this, though showing no more than the shoulders, should indicate his calling in life, especially in the case of a priest, bishop, or patriarch. Russian icon-painters use the term ikóna opléchnaya (to the shoulders) as distinct from golovnáya (head), pogrudndya (bust to the breast), and stoyáchaya (standing, full length).
Another feature of the icon is that it always gives the picture of the Saviour (Spas), the Virgin or of some other saint as facing the worshipper, just as the painted portrait of the dead Egyptian was designed to look at his kinsfolk who were supposed to come to the reception-room of his resting place or to the spot where in the form of his swathed mummy he was buried in the sand. Representations of saints in profile were only to be found on small icons which were hung on to the saint’s big icon as votive reminders of a worshipper; or else they only came in with later times. Finally, the original type of the Egyptian portrait shows with special clearness in the colouring of the icon, particularly in the Russian icon: icons from Greece proper and other varieties frequently diverge from the early type. The reason for this is that the Russian icon, from first to last, drew its inspiration from Greco-Oriental models, these models coming at first from Egypt and Syria and later from Asia Minor which had early adopted the Greco-Oriental style. The Syro-Egyptian style was marked from the beginning by deep, rich, warm, and, at the same time, artistic colouring; on the one hand this reproduced the rich colouring of the Nile valley, on the other it reached the perfect ideal of a deep and rich colour-scale. This colouring reproduces both the hot, pallid buff of the desert sky during the burning Khamsin, and the glorious contrast of the dark lilac, velvety chocolate and reddish-brown mountains amid the buff sand of the desert. From this came the tones that run through Egyptian dress, decorated in dark lilac and chocolate brown on a ground of buff unbleached linen, and through the simple scale of Egyptian wall-paintings with brown and lilac on a buff ground. We find the same thing in the Ravenna mosaics: here the figures of holy men and women are almost without exception in pale buff with lilac adornments of clothes and insignia upon a dark blue ground. We shall later see that the icons which bear in Russian tradition the name of Korsún are all distinguished by a scale of dark chocolate or brown upon a buff ground and these Korsun’ icons, which came to Russia from Chersonesus Taurica, Caffa, and Trebizond, were copies of Greco-Oriental icons. Even more significant is it, that by setting out a series of icons, we can show how the early Venetian icon-painting