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RUSSIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE
THROUGH THE CENTURIES

 
 

Ther Stoglav Church Council

 
 

The name "Stoglav"means "Hundred chapters;" it was given to the council because its decisions were divided into one hundred chapters. The council had to answer questions that Ivan put to it in writing. His questions and his speech at the council have some literary value. Both were written in Ivan's peculiar style that would later be better shown in his correspondence with his adversary Prince Kurbskii. The major aims of the council were to unify the service and Church ritual, revise and correct books, establish schools, fight superstition and heresies, put an end to abuses of power by the clergy, drunkenness, corruption and debauchery. The later sanctions were aimed primarily at the monasteries, where many monks and abbots were formerly princes and boyars and were used to an entirely different life. Ivan spoke also of breakdowns in customs and traditions and asked for strengthening of "True Orthodoxy" in accordance with divine scriptures. Obviously, western influences greatly disturbed the tsar and the council. Stoglav noted that holy rules forbid orthodox believers to follow alien customs and that "Each country has its own laws and habits, which should not move from one people to the other, but each should preserve its own tradition; we the orthodox received the true law from God, which we profaned by turning to various countries, and accepted their vicious customs." How little the attitude of the Soviets in foreign has changed since! To remedy the abuses, Stoglav considered the main duty of the state to give proper religious education to its citizens. As a result a number of measures were undertaken, among which were the revision and correction of books and a return to orthodoxy in art. Icon painters were told to be humble and live piously, not quarrel or drink and , above all, to follow strictly the icon-painting manual. The Church, not the artist, was to decide how an icon should be painted and what a saint should look like. The high clergy was told to insist that ancient icons should serve as models and not let painters get involved in their own inventions, disregarding the letter of the manual. Rublev was pointed to as a good example to follow. However, the new generation of iconographers was unable to each the artistic level of Rublev and Dionisii, despite the more favorable conditions that prevailed during most of the 16th century. Many of Stoglav's decisions remained on paper, or were only partially put into effect, and it could not have been otherwise. There would be no school of iconography if the painters had had strictly copied Greek originals and neither would Russia have Rublev, Dionissi or others. Contrary to council directives, a good part of Russian painting underwent several changes and became very productive. Instead of the wide-ranging artistic creativeness, rhythmic lines and soft coloring that prevailed in Rublev's style, we see in the 16th century the tendency to go into more detail, use darker shades and produce a sort of a jewelry work. Indeed the use of silver and gold considerably increased. A great many rather miniature designs overburdened the icon and left little room for powerful and free expression by the artist. The composition of the icon became more complicated but, also , more versatile and more Russian. There were clear indications of national folklore becoming more influential on iconography. For centuries it had lived side by side with official Church art or, rather, outside of it. Icon painters now more often depicted contemporary scenes, dressed their personages in contemporary garments and put in the background the Russian church with its onion-shaped cupolas. Then came increased use of gold, which originally served to paint the nimbus around the saint's head, or intermixed with other colors, usually in the form of thin lines, for painting garments, beard or hair. But its application indeed became exaggerated when gold or gold-plated or silver sheets were used for making trappings that were simply nailed on the icon. It all started with a tiny engraved metal frame around the icon which rapidly grew into a setting that entirely covered the icon, leaving only the head or one or two hands uncovered. The icon became an ornament mad of metal that was engraved and embossed, reproducing the painted image underneath it which was no longer visible. The new taste for shiny metal considerably hurt the further development of iconography as a par of artistic painting. The door was open to a partial distancing from true art form into a handicraft.
On the insistence of Ivan the Terrible the "Stoglav" council reluctantly legalized the until then tacitly accepted practice that icons could include no saintly persons. Thus the tsar himself became the first to initiate changes. Maxim the Greek was among the first to raise his voice against the stenciled pattern in icon painting and fervently defended the introduction of new more liberal subjects. The entire matter was discussed, sometimes very heatedly at the Stoglav Council. This continued at the Church council of 1554, convened to hear complaints against new trends in iconography.

 
 

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