The British Museum collection
Page 2
A completely different history, from a different epoch, is to be
found in the image of St George on a black horse (cat. no. 1).
Private collectors discovered the icon in a tiny northern village
called Il’inskii Pogost on the banks of the river Pinega in 1959.
The northern region of Archangel has given Russian culture many
wonderful works of iconography, amongst which are the unique royal
gates from the village of Krivoe dating to the pre-Mongol period
(Tretiakov Gallery, 12th–13th century). During the period known as
‘Khrushchev’s Thaw’, a new wave of enthusiasm arose for Old Russian
art. Museums organised expeditions during which they competed with
private collectors in the hunt for old icons still remaining in
abandoned churches and distant villages
. Local inhabitants
often recycled icons – the images on which were hidden beneath
layers of over-painting and black oil – as table tops, doors, and
for agricultural purposes, much as the stones of the Coliseum were
used in the building of ordinary homes in medieval Rome. Thus, this
icon of St George had been used as a window shutter in a village
building. The icon was found by the literary critic, writer
and Brezhnev-era dissident Andrei Siniavsky (1925–97) and his wife
Mariia Rozanova (born 1930). It was brought to Moscow where it was
restored in 1960 by the famous Moscow restorer Adolf Ovchinnikov,
revealing an older image beneath the later layers. This rare – in
terms of artistic expression – icon became famous after it was
shown in the ‘Northern Letters’ exhibition in the Tretiakov Gallery
in Moscow (1964) where, as G. Vzdorov rightly observed, it was
‘wrongly’ identified as an icon of the Pskov school
. After a legal
process, Andrei Siniavsky and Mariia Rozanova brought the icon to
Paris in 1973, where they lived as émigrés, and subsequently sold
it in 1986 to the British Museum.
The icon of St George is a genuine masterpiece of Russian
painting. The delicate figure of the saint, sitting on a black
horse which is, as it were, stretching the whole width of the icon
panel in one leap, embodies the freedom-loving spirit of the
northerners. The icon painter disregards the strict rules of the
Byzantine iconographical tradition. His light, almost
watercolour-like manner of painting, harmonising with the
translucent colours of the northern countryside, contains the
strength of that ‘authentic folk art’ which Henri Matisse observed
in the Russian icon.
It is not by chance that specialists have
failed to agree upon a definition of the icon’s style: one
considers it to have originated in the Pskov school; others have
linked it with the ‘Moscow artistic circle’
.In fact the iconography
of the Russian North, which generally interpreted more freely the
strict canons traditionally adhered to, is influenced by both
Novgorod and Moscow in the first half of the 15th century. Similar
traits are visible in many paintings of the Northern region. Old
Novgorodian influence is overlaid with features of the ‘Moscow
style’, arriving together during the active ‘monastic colonisation’
of these territories by Moscow.
The iconography of this icon is within the
framework of a traditional ‘concise’ schema of Novgorodian
iconography of the 14th to 15th centuries. In agreement with this
schema, the figures of the princess and other witnesses of the
miracle are not shown – compare to
‘The Miracle of St George and the Dragon’ (cat. no. 51). The image relates
to the opening words of the saint’s Life, where it says
that ‘the Saint crossed himself and charged forwards to meet the
monster, saying ‘My Lord God, destroy the fierce serpent so that
these unbelievers may believe’. The treatment of the subject in
early Russian icons differs from the Western, knightly version of
the image, in that here divine providence is underlined. George is
not just a warrior, killing the dragon with his own strength, but a
saint, surmounting evil with the strength of prayer. The lofty
symbolism of the icon is especially evident in comparison with
another image of St George from the British Museum’s collection –
an icon of the 13th century, which Robin Cormack ascribes to the
pictorial art of the crusaders in the East
.
Later, in the 15th and 16th centuries in
Novgorodian iconography, the image of St George the Conqueror takes
on the characteristics of a hero from a folk tale, as evidenced
by an icon with the Miracle of St George and the Dragon (cat. no. 2) in the
Museum’s collection dating from the first half of the 16th century.
Here, the saint, astride a white horse with an elegant red harness,
defeats the dragon which is crawling out from a black cave amongst
multicoloured crags; but stripped of dynamics and scene, the
composition has acquired the character of an everyday action.