Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) Ágnes Kriza - Depicting Orthodoxy in the Russian Middle Ages_ The Novgorod Icon of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom-Oxford University Press (2022).
385 Pages
Foreword
The four main parts (WORD, IMAGE, IDENTITY, and HISTORY) of this volume are supplemented with an Appendix, which constitutes an organic part of the book. The Appendix contains a Critical edition of the Sophia commentary with an English translation, as well as a Catalogue of the fifteenth-sixteenthcentury Sophia images. Apart from bibliographical and other factual references, this Catalogue provides a short iconographic description of the images.
Based on the available information, the Catalogue also presents an iconographic classification of the early Sophia images and a survey of the development of the Novgorod Wisdom iconography. In order to avoid repeated descriptions of and bibliographical references to Sophia images, I refer to this Catalogue and its items (as ‘Cat. number’) throughout the book.
Translations are my own unless indicated otherwise. Biblical quotations are from the English translation of the Orthodox Study Bible, in which the Old Testament is a translation made from the Septuagint and the New Testament is that of the New King James Version. Accordingly, the numbering of Old Testament biblical (including psalm) verses follows the Septuagint.
I use the simplified Library of Congress system of transliterating Russian Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet, as well as the BukyVede Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic font with the kind permission of Sebastian Kempgen. This volume is an updated and extended version of my doctoral dissertation defended in 2017 at the University of Cambridge.
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been completed without the support that I have received from a number of people. First of all, I want to extend my gratitude to my supervisor at the University of Cambridge, Richard Marks for his scholarly guidance, patience, support, and for showing perpetual confidence in this research. I am likewise grateful to the reviewers of my dissertation, Antony Eastmond and Rowan Williams, as well as the anonymous reviewers of this book. For their advice and the helpful consultations, I am indebted to Donal Cooper, Michael S. Flier, Simon Franklin, Anna Jouravel, Nazar Kozak, Victoria Legkikh, Alexei Lidov, Basil Lourié, Istvan Perczel, Tatiana Popova, Aleksandr Preobrazhensky, Ludmila Shchennikova, Jonathan Shepard, Engelina Smirnova, Oleksiy Tolochko, Tatiana Tsarevskaya, and Konstantin Vershinin.
My endeavour to obtain images for this book and the permissions to publish them was generously supported by Aleksey Alekseev, Andrey Borodikhin, Nazar Kozak, Alexei Lidov, Gaspar Parlagi, Aleksandr Preobrazhensky, Alexei Rastorguev, Irina Shalina, Anna Zakharova, and Vera Zavaritskaya. For their help with the acquisition of the copies of manuscripts, I am grateful to Andrey Borodikhin and Olga Grinchenko. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Richard Marks, Alexandre Denizé, and Luke Saville for their assistance in language editing. The greatest thanks, though, must go to my husband, Péter Toth, who motivated and helped this research in every possible way.
The publication of this volume was supported by the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture.
Just as the pious, orthodox and grand prince Vladimir had himself received baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in Cherson, and having come to Kyiv, commanded all to be baptised, and then the entire Rus land was baptised. And in the beginning, from Constantinople a metropolitan was sent to Kyiv, and bishop Ioakim was sent to Great Novgorod. And grand prince Vladimir ordered that a church of stone be built in Novgorod, Saint Sophia, the Wisdom of God, according to the Constantinople custom and the icon of Sophia, the Wisdom of God was then painted, after a Greek prototype.
Priest Silvestr, during the Viskovatyi Affair, 1554*
Introduction
The Novgorod Sophia Icon and the Viskovatyi Affair
The year 1547 was a turning point in Russian history. That year Moscow Grand Prince Ivan IV (1533-47) was crowned by Metropolitan Makarii (1542-65) in the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral as the first tsar of Russia (1547-84). That same year can also be considered as a watershed moment in the history of Russian art. The coronation of the tsar was followed by a devastating fire which seriously damaged the cathedrals of the Moscow Kremlin and their icons.
After this fire, one of the most influential clerics of the Kremlin, Silvestr (¢ ca. 1566), the priest of the Annunciation Cathedral, the personal church of the tsar, commissioned a series of new icons. Both Metropolitan Makarii and Silvestr moved from Novgorod to Moscow, a city located on the western border of today Russia, where Makarii served as Archbishop between 1526 and 1542. Unsurprisingly, Silvestr appointed painters from Novgorod and neighbouring Pskov for the work.
The new icons were distinguished by their unparalleled complex and dense innovative iconographies which exercised a lasting influence on the subsequent development of Russian painting. Since Moscow had its own traditions in painting, these new icons, which demonstrated a novel approach to the visual and created a new relationship between text and image, provoked protests from the Muscovites. The opposition of Ivan Viskovatyi, Tsar Ivan IV’s learned diplomat to these icons, led to a council in 1554, now known as the Viskovatyi Affair, which discussed the problem of allegory in icon-painting.’
Ivan attacked the incomprehensibility of these icons and also criticized their different allegorical representations of God, especially those which represented Christ with angelic wings. In his letter opposing the new icons, Viskovatyi argued that the symbolic images of God “diminish the glory of the representation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh’, referring to the Christological tenets established by the defenders of icons during the Byzantine Iconoclasm (726-843). However, in 1554, Metropolitan Makarii defended these images and Priest Silvester related the circumstances of the commissioning of the icons and provided a list of the controversial iconographies.” Although both Makarii and Silvestr cited their ancient origin, the majority of these iconographies were innovations that appeared for the first time in Rus. In fact, there was only one icon on this list which had a well-established iconography: the icon of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, the local icon of the Novgorod Sophia Cathedral (Cat. 3; Fig. 0.1).
Indeed, the icon was not as old as Silvestr claimed: it was not Vladimir the Great, the grand prince of Kyiv (980-1015), who constructed the Novgorod Sophia Cathedral (Fig.0.2) but his grandson, Vladimir, prince of Novgorod (1036-52). Vladimir was the son of grand prince Iaroslav the Wise (1019-54), to whom the construction of the Kyiv Sophia Cathedral can be linked. It is also very unlikely that the Wisdom icon was painted after a Greek prototype in the eleventh century.’ The Novgorod Sophia icon was mentioned for the first time in the early sixteenth-century Novgorod chronicles.* In 1510, Vasilii III, the Moscow grand prince ordered that a candle in front of this miraculous icon in the Novgorod Sophia Cathedral be burned in perpetuity ‘according to the ancient custom’.° The earliest dated example of the iconography has been preserved in the freshly explored fresco of the Novgorod Archiepiscopal Palace dating back to 1441 (Cat. 2; Figs 0.3, 11.4). The other oldest Sophia images, including the icon of the Sophia Cathedral, are also from the fifteenth century, but do not have certain dating (see the Catalogue in the Appendix). Nonetheless, it is likely that the Novgorodian iconography remained unknown in Moscow until the mid-sixteenth century and thus provided an opportunity for Silvestr to maintain the early origin of the disputed icons by referring to the ‘ancient’ Sophia icon.
The Sophia icon easily justifies the accusation of its incomprehensibility. The image shows an enthroned, winged, and crowned beardless figure, the Wisdom of God, in regal vestments with a burning red face, seated between the standing figures of the Theotokos with Emmanuel in her hands and John the Baptist, holding a scroll. Her throne is held by seven pillars and her feet are on a circular footstool. Over Sophia’s head is the bust of the blessing Christ. Above this composition is a segment of heaven with the prepared throne flanked by angels.®
The meaning of this icon was apparently unclear to contemporaries as is attested by the surviving commentary. The earliest known copies are in fifteenth-century manuscripts, but this text also appears in some Sophia representations, most importantly in the icon of the Novgorod Sophia Cathedral (Cat. 3, Fig. 0.1).’ It, however, does not help the comprehension of this iconography: the commentary is just as obscure as the icon itself. The meaning of the winged Sophia, as well as the dating and localization of the first appearance of the iconography, has remained a great art-historical conundrum.
The Novgorod Sophia Icon and the Sophiological Controversy
This opacity of the Wisdom icon has led to diverse interpretations. During the nineteenth century, when the iconography appeared in scholarly publications for the first time, researchers who tried to decipher the meaning of the icon primarily highlighted its Christological symbolism: Wisdom is Christ, in accordance with the biblical (1 Corinthians 1:24; Proverbs 9:1-5) and common patristic interpretation of Sophia.* In 1884, the Ukrainian scholar, Feofan Lebedintsev connected the angelic image of Sophia with the Angel of the Great Counsel, from the Book of Isaiah (9:5, according to the Septuagint), which is a prophecy about Christ’s redemptory incarnation pre-eternally decided by the Holy Trinity.’ Nevertheless, why Christ was depicted again, above the head of ‘Angel-Christ’, and the meaning of the three-figured Deesis composition of the icon with flanking Theotokos and John the Baptist remained unclear.
A Marian interpretation of Sophia was also proposed for three reasons. Firstly, because the seventeenth-century Wisdom icon of the Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv represents the Mother of God in the centre. Secondly, because the dedication feast of the Novgorod Sophia Cathedral was the Dormition of the Mother of God from the late fifteenth century, the time of Archbishop Gennadii (1484-1504)."° Finally, the main argument deployed to justify a Marian explanation of Wisdom was the commentary itself which, in various redactions, names Sophia ‘the Church of God, Sophia, the most pure Mother of God, that is the virginal soul’. Fedor Buslaev suggested that the meaning of the icon underwent a transformation over time: Sophia-Christ, with the aid of monastic idea of virginity attributed to Sophia in the commentary, was gradually perceived as the image of the Virgin Mother of God."” In 1876, however, Filomonov, who argued that the Marian interpretation of Sophia appeared under Western influence, put forward another possible explanation of the icon: the winged Sophia originally referred not to a concrete person, but was the personification of the abstract concept of Wisdom.’”
A quarter of a century later, a similar idea was expounded by the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) in his lecture (1898) on the French positivist philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857).’* Solovyov linked his teaching about Sophia as the Divine Humanity with Comte’s Religion of Humanity and the recently accepted Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin (1854). For Solovyov, the Novgorod Sophia icon, a matter of Russian ‘religious creative work’, was a manifestation of this Sophiology:
Who does this main, central, and royal person depict, so clearly distinct from Christ, from the Mother of God, and from the angels? The image is called Sophia the Wisdom of God... Neither God, nor the eternal Word of God, nor an angel, nor a holy man, the Great, royal, and feminine Being accepts veneration from both the one who completed the Old Testament and from the foremother of the New Testament. Who could it be other than the truest, purest, and most complete humanity, the highest and all-encompassing form and living soul of nature and the universe, eternally united, and in the process of time uniting with the Divine, and uniting to Him all that is?’*
Solovyov’s Sophiology had a wide-reaching impact on Russian theology and fundamentally determined the subsequent historiography of the Sophia icon. In 1914, Pavel Florensky (1882-1938), a theologian polymath and martyr of the Soviet terror, devoted a chapter of the published version of his theological dissertation, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: an Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, to Sophia (Letter Ten), where he aimed to reconcile Solovyov’s philosophy with the doctrines of the Orthodox Church. This theological discourse was accompanied by an art-historical study of the Sophia icon and an analysis of its commentary. Based on this commentary, Florensky proposed that there might have been more interpretative layers of the icon and he was the first scholar to point out its ecclesiological symbolism: ‘For some scholars, Sophia is the Word of God or even the Holy Trinity. For others, she is the Mother of God. For still others, she is the personification of Her Virginity. For others still, she is the Church. For yet others, she is mankind in its totality, the Grand Etre of Auguste Comte... [the old-Russian commentaries] give a subtle synthesis of the different aspects of Sophia.’*
Florensky’s attempt, however, to reconcile Solovyov’s ideas and ecclesiastical dogmas did not prove successful as the subsequent history of Sophiology showed. After the Russian revolution, the greatest promoter of Sophiology was Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), a follower of Solovyov and friend of Florensky, who was exiled from the Soviet Russia and settled in Paris where the so-called Russian Religious Renaissance reached its fullest flowering at this time.’® Here, in this inspirational intellectual environment, he developed his sophiological theology in a series of publications. In common with Solovyov, he linked Wisdom with Mary, by calling her a ‘personal manifestation of Sophia’ and Sophia’s ‘created image’.’” Bulgakov’s ideas, however, were met with the growing opposition from the Orthodox émigré theologians. In 1935, Bulgakov together with his teaching about Sophia the Eternal Feminine, was condemned as heretical by the Patriarchate of Moscow.
The main argument used by Bulgakov’s opponents was the Christological interpretation of Sophia, not only widely discussed in nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century art-historical and historical studies on the Sophia icon and churches dedicated to the Sophia, but already advanced in an anonymous sixteenth-century treatise which questioned the Marian explanation of Wisdom."* Whilst Vladimir Lossky (1903-58) attacked Bulgakov’s teaching directly, another remarkable theologian and patristic scholar, George Florovsky (1893-1979) expressed his criticism implicitly."
The latter's premise was that modern Sophiology abandoned the tradition of Orthodox Church Fathers. This abandonment was a logical consequence of Western influence in contemporary Orthodox theology which he termed the Western pseudomorphosis of theology whose origins went back to the sixteenth century. Florovsky’s programme of a ‘return to the Church Fathers’ constituted the basis of his ground-breaking studies in patristics.
Significantly, Florovsky saw a correlation between the pseudomorphosis of theology and the transformation of icon-painting which, for him, began with the Sophia icon.”° He addressed this problem in his influential paper On the veneration of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom in Byzantium and in Russia published in 1932, the main conclusions of which appeared in his major monograph The Ways of Russian Theology (1937).?" Much like Pavel Florensky, Florovsky conducted in-depth art-historical research into the iconography of Sophia, the creation of which he linked with the activities of Archbishop Gennadii.
Florovsky compared the ‘apotheosis of virginity in the Sophia commentary with German mysticism and the Sophia iconography with the images of Wisdom in the printed editions of the fourteenth-century German mystic Heinrich Suso’s Exemplar (1482, 1512): on the Novgorod Sophia icon ‘the traditional image of the Angel of the Great Council appeared in the new light’ of Western mysticism.” Just as Solovyov created an indirect link between the Sophia iconography and the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, so too did Florovsky, but this link had a sharp polemical message in his narrative. For Florovsky, the Novgorod Sophia icon, with its alleged Western elements and ‘decorative symbolism, or more precisely, allegorism’, constituted ‘the break with hiearatic realism’ and signalled the decline of medieval Russian iconpainting.”’
Florovsky discussed the Viskovatyi affair in the context of the Novgorod Sophia icon. From this perspective, the dispute between Metropolitan Makarii and Viskovatyi reflected the debate between the Sophiologists and their opponents. Viskovatyi’s protest was a ‘return to the Fathers’. Based on quotations from patristic texts written during the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm (726-843), Viskovatyi argued that the new allegorical images of God in the Kremlin undermined the significance of Christ’s incarnation—and this was the opponents’ main claim against Sophiology.
Florovsky’s inference clearly indicates this: “Viskovatyi did not defend the past, he defended ‘truth’ that is, iconographic realism. His quarrel with Metropolitan Makarii was a clash of two religious and aesthetic orientations: traditional hieratic realism as opposed to a symbolism nourished by a heightened religious imagination.’*
This critique of ‘the new trend’ of Russian icon-painting exercised a profound impact on scholarship of medieval Russian art. In his seminal book, Theology of the Icon in Orthodox Church, the icon-painter Leonid Ouspensky (1902-87), a friend of Vladimir Lossky, described the history of Russian icon-painting following the Florovskian scheme of pseudomorphosis of theology.” Unsurprisingly, Florovsky’s aforementioned words from his Sophia study appear as verbal quotations in Ouspensky’s discussion of the Viskovatyi Affair which is the focal point of his book.*
Nevertheless, whilst Florovsky’s ‘neopatristic synthesis’ stimulated fruitful patristic studies and Ouspensky’s icon theology inspired contemporary icon-painting, the stigmatization of allegorical trends of fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Russian painting as quasi heretical virtually paralyzed scholarship in this field. Furthermore, Ouspensky’s book was not published in Russian until 1989 (the French version of the Theology of the Icon appeared in 1980). Up to this point, in the Soviet period research on these complex iconographies had taken a backseat: the Novgorod Sophia icon itself was rarely mentioned in art-historical monographs.””
The State of Research
Although today the problem of allegorical iconographies, including the Novgorod Sophia, is a familiar scholarly subject, the consequences of the Sophia debate have determined the historiography. Firstly, the sophiological paradigm hinders scholars from addressing the problem of allegorical icon-painting from a historical perspective: what was the function of these novel icons in the historical context of their appearance? Why did the earlier iconographies prove unsatisfactory, hence the demand appeared to create new ones?
To what extent were they related to earlier iconographic and artistic traditions, both in Rus and outside of it, and to what extent were they innovative? These questions have hardly ever been raised in art-historical studies. Instead, the emphasis is on their deviation from Orthodox tradition. It is indicative that, similarly to Florovsky and Ouspensky, a recent publication on the post-1547 Kremlin icons charges Metropolitan Makarii with ignorance by claiming that ‘he did not comprehend the theological content of icons, as he thought that they could be interpreted in a rational way by a set of signs or symbols which illustrate a certain text or a theological concept’.”*
Art-historical scholarship of the Novgorod Sophia icon has been determined by the theological premises formulated during the Sophia debate. Accordingly, the main emphasis is on the Christological meaning of the image. Shortly after condemnation of Bulgakov’s Sophiology, Albert M. Ammann published two articles in which he classified the winged Sophia of the Novgorod icon as one type of Slavonic Angel-Christ representations. He identified the Novgorod Sophia firstly with the winged Wisdom-Christ images of the Balkan “Wisdom has built her house’ iconography, and secondly with the images of Christ, the Angel of the Great Counsel which was disseminated widely in late Byzantine painting.”
Paradoxically, he created this link by referencing to Metropolitan Makarii, who never provided any explanation of the Sophia iconography, nor did he equate it with any of the winged Christ images which were discussed in the Viskovatyi Affair, as Ammann suggested.*? Nevertheless, Ammann’s articles, with their persuasive iconographic classifications, exercised a similar impact as Florovsky’s Sophia study: the scholarly discussions of Christ’s angelic representations and the Sophia iconography became intertwined.
Following the Sophia debate, there has been a consensus amongst theologians and art historians which serves as point of departure for all current interpretations of the Novgorod Sophia icon: the winged Sophia is Christ, the Angel of the Great Counsel. That there are a series of factors, primarily the commentary, which do not support this premise was attempted to be resolved mainly by two theories, both developed by theologians. The first belongs to Florovsky, who, as we have seen, suggested that the icon and its commentary were created under Western heterodox influence. Although Ammann’s classification of Slavonic Angel-Christ representations challenged the Western origins of the Sophia iconography, the idea that the commentary, with its Marian allusions, was influenced by Western theological concepts remains alive.**
The other explanation can be linked to another eminent theologian, John Meyendorff, whose ground-breaking research on the fourteenth-century Hesychast controversy over Divine energies was in many aspects inspired by Florovsky’s ‘neopatristic synthesis’.*” Meyendorff pointed out that the Hesychast Patriarch of Constantinople, Philotheos Kokkinos (1353-4; 1364-76) wrote a treatise on the sophiological verses of the Proverbs which names the Divine energies, belonging to the Holy Trinity, as Sophia.** Significantly, Philotheos had close ecclesiasticalcultural contacts with Rus and many of his works were translated into Slavonic.
These translations, however, do not include his Hesychast writings.** Using Philotheos’s Greek text and relying on Ammann’s iconographic studies, Meyendorff has speculated that the red, fiery face of Sophia on the Novgorod Sophia icon represents the Divine energy belonging to the Holy Trinity who is visualized by the three different representations of Christ in the icon (Emmanuel, Angel-Christ, and adult Christ). Thus, in Meyendorff’s interpretation, the Novgorod Sophia is a Hesychast Trinitarian image.
Meyendorff’s hypothesis, which is widely accepted today, has further implications.** Notably, the icon, which on the basis of stylistic analysis is considered to be the earliest extant example of Novgorod Sophia iconography, does not show any distinguishing feature of Novgorod painting (Cat. 1; Fig. 0.4). It is believed to be the work of a Moscow or Tver icon-painter, rather than that of a Novgorodian.
To resolve this contradiction, Lev Lifshits used Meyendorff’s Hesychast interpretation: he associated this icon, today kept in the Kremlin Annunciation Cathedral, with Arsenii, bishop of Tver (1390-1409) who had direct connections with Byzantine Hesychasts.** He was a member of the close circle of Kiprian, the Metropolitan of Kyiv (1375-1406), who, in his turn, was appointed by Patriarch Philotheos.*’ Lifshits argued that the icon in the Kremlin Annunciation Cathedral, the earliest Novgorod Sophia icon, was painted in Tver, during the lifetime of Arsenii, in the first quarter of the fifteenth century.
Another recent proposition belongs to Tatiana Tsarevskaya who put forward that the Novgorod Sophia iconography had been created in Byzantium and disseminated in central Rus before its appearance in Novgorod: it was seen by Evfimii I, archbishop of Novgorod (1428-56) when he was in Moscow in 1437 and then it was copied in the fresco decoration of the Archiepiscopal Palace in 1441.**
Although the interpretative framework of the Novgorod Sophia icon has been determined by the premise that Sophia is the Angel-Christ, as well as by the Hesychast and Western theories, its explanations in recent scholarly publications cover nearly all fields of Christian theology and not just those which were mentioned by Pavel Florensky: Triadology, Christology, Pneumatology, soteriology, Mariology, ecclesiology, Eucharistic doctrine, theology of Creation, Eschatology, ethics, and mysticism.
Moreover, the political interpretation of the Sophia icon is also frequent, primarily in publications on the history of Novgorod and its coins.” As a result, the challenge today is to systematize all the available information regarding the Sophia icon and reconcile its different interpretations, an endeavour for which numerous attempts have been made in the last decades.*°
Amongst these, the Sophia—the Wisdom of God exhibition held in Rome in 1999 and thereafter in Moscow in 2000, is particularly significant.*t The concept of this exhibition reflected the ideas of Sophiologists concerning the different aspects of Sophia.*? Here the Novgorod Sophia icon was associated with iconographies that were attributed to sophiological meanings.*?
Whilst the exhibition demonstrated the inextricable intertwining of the Novgorod Sophia iconography with the extremely rich allegorical traditions of late medieval Russian iconpainting, the art-historical presentations and interpretations of these sophiological or supposedly sophiological iconographies were methodologically flawed by an approach that neglected the historical aspects. As a result, they were unable to place the different innovative Russian iconographies in their historical context. In the exhibition catalogue, like most other publications on the Novgorod Sophia icon, the question of why this enigmatic iconography was created remained unanswered. Despite numerous studies, the basic meaning and origin of the Novgorod Sophia iconography, as well as its place in the history of Russian art has not yet been clarified. This book addresses this lacuna.
Research Questions and Objectives
This research explores the meaning, function, and historical context of the creation of the Novgorod Sophia iconography. In broader terms, however, by investigating the Wisdom icon, the aim of this study is to examine the historical roots and specific features of allegorical trends of Russian icon-painting, the appearance of which in mid-sixteenth-century Moscow led to the Viskovatyi affair. Accordingly, the focal point of this book is the earliest history of the Novgorod Sophia iconography and its commentary. Their subsequent development, together with the history of other sophiological images (most importantly, the iconography of “Wisdom has built her house’) will be discussed only to the extent relevant to the exploration of the Novgorod Sophia icon’s origins.
There are three main reasons why this monograph has been dedicated to the study of the Novgorod Sophia. Firstly, it is arguably the earliest of the disputed Russian iconographies mentioned in the Viskovatyi Affair. Secondly, its historiography, as we have seen, fundamentally influenced the scholarship on all other late medieval Russian allegorical iconographies. Thirdly, this icon has a commentary which serves as the basis for its investigation.
Moreover, this is the first extant Russian commentary on icons which was to be followed by others: interestingly, Makarii’s explanations of icons in the Viskovatyi Affair clearly reflect the structural characteristics of this and subsequent icon commentaries.** Thus, the investigation of the first commentary can provide valuable information about the new allegorical trends in fifteenth-sixteenth-century Russian icon-painting.
In methodological terms, the chief aim of this study is to separate the investigation of the Sophia icon from the so-called sophiological paradigm. This will be achieved by abandoning the Florovskian idea of ‘returning to the Fathers’ and replacing it by the concept of ‘returning to medieval sources’. Metropolitan Makarii’s attempt to legitimize the iconographies, disputed by Viskovatyi, by references to biblical, liturgical, and patristic texts clearly indicates that medieval Russian allegorical iconographies are always connected with texts.** It is the art historian’s task to link the iconographies with relevant texts.
Scholars of medieval Russian art and culture often propose that there is an evident overlap between the texts of the Church Fathers accessible in modern publications, translations, and the reception of this patristic tradition in Rus. This assumption, however, is erroneous: only a small fraction of Byzantine theological literature was available in Slavonic. Furthermore, a great proportion of those texts which were indeed accessible and read in Rus have never been translated into modern languages or even published.
In iconographic studies, the citation of those texts which could have never been read by the creators of the iconography, leads to ahistorical explanations. For example, the writings of Byzantine Hesychasts on the Divine energies, with the sole exemption of David Disypatos’s brief fragments, were unknown in medieval Rus.*° For that very reason a Hesychast interpretation of the Sophia icon cannot be convincing: the idea that Greek texts, without Slavonic translation, might have inspired the creation of such a significant Russian iconography as the Novgorod Sophia icon can be ruled out.
In contrast, the commentary on the Sophia icon will be at the heart of this study. The surprising neglect of this text in the historiography can be explained by three main factors. First, its use in support of Florensky’s sophiological theory made it an unreliable source, as according to Florovsky’s hypothesis, it was influenced by Western theological writings. Second, without a profound study of the textual history of the commentary, it has been often proposed that the commentary is later than the image itself, therefore it cannot be used for the analysis of the initial meaning of the iconography.*’ Finally, the previously mentioned incomprehensibility of the text has prevented scholars from using it as historical source.
Conversely, based on the textual analysis of the commentary (see the Critical edition in the Appendix) and the historical survey of the development of the Sophia iconography (see the Catalogue), the preposition of this study is that the commentary and the image were created nearly simultaneously in the fifteenth century, therefore they must be investigated together.
Accordingly, a great challenge of this research is to develop a methodology by which the Sophia commentary can be deciphered. This investigation will raise the problem of allegory in medieval Russian art: the relationship between text and image—the obscure commentary and the enigmatic icon. The expectation is that the results of this methodological experiment will be applicable to other iconographies, especially to those which, similarly to the Novgorod Sophia, have a commentary or an explanation by Metropolitan Makarii.
The reconsideration of the Novgorod Sophia icon requires the application of the methodologies of different disciplines. Apart from philology and art history, theological and historical approaches will also be utilized. The interdisciplinary character of the research is reflected in the structure of the book which consists of four main parts: WORD, IMAGE, IDENTITY, and HISTORY. Unlike art historical investigations, the starting point will be the WORD, the commentary, as, undoubtedly, it is the neglect of this text that led earlier studies on Sophia iconography astray.
The analysis of the commentary will be followed by an iconographical study of the Novgorod Wisdom image in the part IMAGE. The exploration of the direct sources of its singular iconographic elements will lead to the analysis of the wider visual and theological context of the icon in the part IDENTITY. Finally, the part HISTORY will reveal the concrete historical circumstances of the creation of the Novgorod Sophia iconography.
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