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Serbian and later Russian icon painters
knew better than their Byzantine masters how to give most of their figures a
unique and often very powerful facial expression. Two years after the Church of
Saint Nicholas at Lipne was built, an icon of the same saint was painted and
signed by a certain Aleksa, son of Peter, and dated 1294. He was probably the
first Russian painter to sign the icon this way and date it. The old frescoes
in the church were completely covered with new paintings during the renovation
of 1877; then after the revolution the church was left to rot and finally Nazis
artillery knocked down its cupola and did other damage. If the possibility
still exists of recovering some of the remaining old frescoes, it would be
interesting to compare them to the icon and find out if Aleksa also took part
in the decoration of the church of Saint Nicholas. Aleksa's icon is of the type
of Saint Nicholas the Thaumaturgos "Nikolai Chudotvorests" and one of
the first of Russian "Zhiteinie ikoni" - hagiographical icons in
which the central figure of a saint is framed by several small separate
pictures called "Kleima," that represent scenes related to the life
of the saint, sometimes taken from the Apocryphal or even combined with moments
from contemporary life. These kinds of icons began to gain in popularity in the
14th century both the people and the painters who found a more free field for
their artistic expression. To begin with instead of painting the scenes Aleksa
framed Saint Nicholas with portraits of saints, apostles and two archangels,
one on each side of the small empty Etimasia - altar, which he put in the
middle above the head. The figures of Christ and the Virgin are also there, one
on each side of Saint Nicholas' head. The icon is exuberantly decorated,
particularly the vestments and the halo. All in all this icon is characteristic
of the transitory period in Novgorod painting which at that time found itself
between Byzantine forms and the specific Russian style that flourished in the
second half of the 14th century.
There is no specific information before the 14th century about the
establishment of durable cultural relations between Russians and Serbs though
we may assume with relative certainty that they existed. The Byzantine
renaissance of The Paleologue time coincides with an equally important artistic
rise in Serbia. Then, by the beginning of the 14th century, the first frescoes
in the new churches of Serbian monasteries were already painted with fresh and
more subtle colors. They are very similar to those in the monastery of Mistra
in the Peloponnesus, considered to be among the best of their time. There is a
certain restlessness in their composition, the number of details had
considerably increased and the first scenes from everyday life started to
appear. In short Serbian artists found themselves in between Byzantine and
Italian influence.
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