Russian Icon

Russian Icon is an art movement. The gallery holds 84 works in this movement, including works by Karl Bryullov, Mikhail Ivanovich Terebenyov and Vladimir Borovikovsky. Browse Russian Icon paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

The Russian icon (Russian *ikona*, from the Greek *eikōn*, "image") is the tradition of sacred panel painting that took root in the lands of the Eastern Slavs after Kievan Rus' adopted Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium in 988. The form, its liturgical function, and its visual grammar were inherited directly from the Eastern Roman Empire, but over the following centuries regional schools — Kiev, then Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir-Suzdal, and finally Moscow — transformed the imported Greek manner into a distinct national art. Icons were never regarded as mere pictures: in Orthodox theology they are "windows into heaven," venerated images that make the holy person present, which is why they were governed by inherited canons rather than individual invention.

The technique was exacting and remarkably stable, practised in egg tempera well into the twentieth century. A seasoned panel of linden or pine was covered with linen (the *pavoloka*) and built up with many layers of chalk-and-glue gesso (*levkas*); the composition was incised into this ground with a needle, backgrounds were gilded with gold leaf, and faces and garments were modelled slowly from dark base tones up to bright highlights. The resulting style favours flattened space, inverse perspective, weightless elongated figures, luminous fields of gold, and a restrained symbolic use of colour over naturalistic illusion.

The golden age came in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Byzantine émigré Theophanes the Greek, who frescoed churches in Novgorod and Moscow, brought a dramatic, austere intensity. His younger contemporary Andrei Rublev (c. 1360–1430), with whom he painted the Moscow Kremlin's Annunciation Cathedral in 1405, broke toward a serene, harmonious lyricism; his *Old Testament Trinity* (now in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery) is the tradition's supreme masterpiece. Rublev's heir Dionisius (c. 1440–1503) refined the Moscow manner, and in the seventeenth century Simon Ushakov introduced Western modelling at the Kremlin Armoury, marking the tradition's turn toward European art.

The icon also produced specifically Russian subjects, above all Saints Boris and Gleb, the murdered princely sons of Vladimir glorified in 1071 as the first native saints and venerated as "passion-bearers." Growing directly out of Byzantine iconography, the Russian icon remained the dominant visual art of Russia until Peter the Great's Westernizing reforms, and its abstraction and spirituality later fascinated twentieth-century modernists.