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The 17th century brought considerable
interest in portrait painting. Though most icons are portraits of saints, some
of them painted quite realistically as in the case of local saints, Russians
and most of the Orthodox world draw a distinct line between
"Iconopis" - (iconography) and "Parsunnoye pismo" -
Portrait painting of secular persons. The adjective "Parsunnoye"
comes from the (foreign) word "Person," which the Russians
erroneously heard and mispronounced as "Parsuna," while the Russian
word "Pismo" has several meanings, such as painting, writing or
simply letter. Together "Parsunnoye pismo" means portrait painting
not of saintly persons. It is true that there were icons painted in the 16th
and even in the 15th century that showed individuals or groups of lay persons,
usually princes or dignitaries or simple people in praying position, or as
participants at a celebration of a religious holiday. Most of the paintings
that decorated the walls of the Golden Palace of Ivan the Terrible also
depicted scenes of lay and religious ceremonies with the tsar and simple
mortals as participants. Some legends say that, to choose those he wanted to
see, Ivan IV was provided with painted portraits of all girls he considered as
candidates for marriage. He was married seven times and, if the legend is true,
he must have had hundreds of portraits, but none have survived to our times.
The first known portraits in existence in the sense of "Parsunnoye
pismo" are those of Ivan's son, Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, and of the national
hero Prince Mikhail Vasilevich Skopin-Shuiskii, dating from the end of the 16th
century. These portraits were painted the same way as the icons, namely, on
wooden panels and in tempera colors mixed with egg yolks, but the novelty
mainly consisted in the technique of execution, for the colors became more
bright, and there was more freedom for the artist to paint the way he wanted.
The result was that realistic and naturalistic tendencies began to prevail in
the new paintings, the entire composition became more liberal and the faces
rendered more gay, more rounded and beautiful.
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