Page 12 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy remarked on ‘extraordinary beauty and the brilliance of its colours... revealed to us quite recently’—revealed, he went on to say, as consolation for Russia, already plunged into a World War, and moving towards the devastation of the Bolshevik Revolution, for ‘the whole of Russian iconography is a response to the infinite sorrow of our existence’.2 The rediscovery of the authentic Russian icon attracted the attention of Russian connoisseurs, not least two collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov, who made collections of ancient Russian icons. Both came from families of Old Believers, who had preserved the ancient tradition of iconography, not least that associ- ated with Andrei Rublev, even if they, too, had lost knowledge of the ancient methods of icon painting, leaving it to fall into desuetude. As well as collecting ancient Russian icons, Shchukin and Morosov also collected modern art, and indeed commissioned paint- ings by modernists such as Matisse and Picasso. Whether it was their appreciation of authentic Russian icons that had opened their eyes to modernist art, or an enthusiasm for pre-modernist Impressionism that had enabled them to see the value of ancient Rus- sian art, has been disputed. Nevertheless, their collecting both forms of art suggests that they sensed some kind of affinity between them.
Something similar is to be found in the great polymath, Fr Pavel Florensky—equally mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and art theorist—whose engagement with an- cient Russian art, inspired or nurtured by his role in cataloguing the religious treasures of the Spiritual Academy of Sergiev Posad in the wake of the Revolution, led to sustained and profound reflections on the presuppositions of ancient iconography and the meta- physical speculations about the nature of space and time and our experience of the world, entailed by such a pre-modern approach. Florensky’s actual writings on these matters were only published half-a-century later and so can hardly have influenced di- rectly the intervening period. Nevertheless, his ideas owe much to ancient Neoplatonism and may reflect a mood inspired by the revelation of icons as ‘contemplation in colour’.
The rediscovery of the icon led to attempts to recover the lost tradition of icon paint- ing, first by Russians in exile, such as Leonid Uspensky and Gregory Krug. Quite inde- pendently Fotis Kontoglou sought out this lost technique, turning, not to the Russian icons of Rublev and his contemporaries, but to late Palaiologan Byzantine iconography. Modernists themselves, such as Natalia Goncharova, made attempts at icon painting, though engagement with icons among the modernists mostly took a less direct form.
So far, it is probably fair to say, most reflection on the apparent affinity between Mod-
2 Eugène Troubetskoi, Trois Études sur l’icône (Paris: YMCA-Press/O.E.I.L., 1986), 22, 46; in an essay on Russian icons called ‘Contemplation in Colour’ (1916).
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