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Even more impressive and more
representative of the illustrative style that burst into the Yaroslavl region
in the second half of the 17th century are the frescoes in the Church of Saint
John the Precursor at Tolchokovo, a suburb of Yaroslavl just across the river
Kotorosl. One has the impression that beautiful enormous carpets in which green
hues dominate, covers all its walls, pillars, arches, even the sides of doors
and windows. The frescoes of the main church were painted more or less in
accordance with ecclesiastical requirements, though with considerable freedom
of composition, color and arrangement. Those in the galleries are crowded with
scenes from the Old testament, the Apocalypse, lives of the local saints and
from the Church and national history. There are thousands of figures spread
over the interior of the Church, the largest number of figures ever painted in
Russia. The master painters of this remarkable and very intricate composition
were Dmitrii Grigorievich Plekhanov, a native of Pereslavl Zaleskii, and Fedor
Ignatiev, who are known to have collaborated with their senior and mentor Gurii
Nikitin. Plekhanov and Ignatiev were assisted by another fourteen painters,
mostly those that had worked with Nikitin in the Church of Saint Elijah
fourteen years earlier. It took them just over a year in 1694-1695 to decorate
entirely the walls of Saint John the Precursor, a very short time for such a
complicated job. The chapels and the galleries were frescoed in 1700,
presumably by the same painters. Contrary to the accepted custom of painting
the Last Judgement on the western wall, they moved it to the gallery on the
north side, and in its place painted scenes from the "Song of Songs"
borrowed from Visshers Bible. Here again all persons are dressed in Russian
costume and several other changes were made to make them look Orthodox and
Russian. In some cases the reproductions look better than the originals. In the
scene "Feast of Herod" the plates, cups, dishes etc., are
contemporary Russian; the dance of Salome is quite natural and the guests
feasting at their ease. The dame may be said of the d"Baptismal,"
which looks more like "Bathing," with some people dressing
themselves, the others undressing, half-dressed etc. Animals, trees and flowers
are panted with the same realistic approach. In all it is a gallery of animated
murals, masterfully painted in bright and pure hues.
It took the Russians a few centuries to free themselves from strong Byzantine
influence and develop their own style of iconography. Their art reached its
golden age between the middle of the 15th and the middle of the 16th centuries.
They started to cover their best icons with repousse silver and gold plates
"Oklad and all sorts of jewels, so that hardly anything but the face and a
hand could be seen, and mediocre and even bad painters painted over their
beautiful old frescoes with cheap colors . Deprived of seeing the best they had
in painting, they began to forget about it. This period of retrogression in ar
became highly controversial when, around the middle of the 17th century,
western culture began to penetrate into Russia.
It started with literature and education brought from the already infiltrated
Ukraine, which the former students of the Kievan Academy successfully
propounded in Moscow. In the absence of Russian instructors, they became
teachers at the first Russian theological school, founded by Fedor Rtishchev in
1648-1649 at the Anderevskii Monastery near Moscow. Two more schools that
emphasized Latinism were established; one in the Chudov Monastery in 1653 and
one in the monastery of the Savior in 1665. The latter two merged in 1686 and
one in the Monastery of the Savior in 1665. The latter two merged in 1686 to
become the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, which taught Greek, Latin, grammar,
rhetoric and the liberal sciences, and soon became a decisive influence on
education and religious matters. Strangely enough, the top men around the Tsar,
such as Princes Vasilii Golitsin an I.A. Kvhvorostinin, Fedor Rtishchev Simeon
Polotskii, Atanasii Ordin-Nashchokin, Artamon Matveyev, Grigorii K. Kotoshikhin
and others, were the first to adhere to the Western European way of life and
culture. Tsar Alexei himself took great Pleasure in the fist Moscow theater,
which was established and directed by foreigners; we have already mentioned how
fond his son Fedor was of foreign engravings.
It was not surprising to see the painters, encouraged by their superiors, also
turn their eyes towards the West. What astonished many was the speed with which
the Moscow school of painting rid itself of old national Novgorod artistic
traditions and of the saints themselves as principal subjects. The painters of
the second half of the 17th century and after were not monks but professionals,
and it was natural for the new variety of themes to have stronger appeal to
them. This variety was also western, and this alone had always been considered
superior In Russia, as even today despite official propaganda. But most amazing
was the fact that, despite new sources of inspiration and the new creative
freedom that was offered to the, most Russian painters, including the Kremlin's
izpgrafs, lost their feel for the picturesque. Their colors became less
transparent, dull and sometimes unpleasant. An illustrative approach to the
subject prevailed with most of them; their design often followed a standard
pattern that was repeated by one after the other. With the very similar and
often dull colors they used, it became impossible to tell one painter from the
other. So, with loss of contact with their national sources and tradition on
one hand, and the exaggerated imitation of western models on the other, the
Russian art of painting reached a dead end. Different from the canonized and
stabilized Byzantine art, Western art proved to be a live art, subject to
continuous changes. Unable to catch up quickly, as they had with the Byzantine
art, Russians had to remain western apprentices most of the time. For the same
reasons iconography was turned into a handicraft. Of course, there were
exceptions, but they were not many. Practitioners of the old art went deep into
the country, almost underground, where the traditional style survived for a
while. When Aleksei's son, Peter the Great, took the reins of state into his
hands, new, forceful, modernizing, changes swept the country. He was the first
to consolidate the various departments of the Armory Chamber, which many art
historians proudly call the First Russian Academy of Art, or sometimes The
Ministry of Art, into a single establishment, and he renamed it the Workshop of
the Armory Chamber (Masterskaya Oruzheynoy Palati) and put it under the control
of the Senate. The painters once more had to turn to foreigners; and learned
from them how to use easels and new colors and to paint directly from nature.
For photos of Yaroslavl including these churches please go to
Yaroslavl.
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