Icons. Nikodim Kondakov

coat’), which are defined as bright, pale, red, or dark. Further, an icon-painter, after specifying the ochre-coat, pays attention to the tone of the sankir ‘flesh priming’, as he calls the ground coat under all bodies and faces, covered indeed by the ochre layer but appearing in places as a fundamental shadow tint. The reason for this is clear – being unable to study all the details of the drawing, the icon-painter fixes on the visible details of okhrénie, just as students of the history of Western painting traditionally paid special attention to fine shades of difference in the flesh tints. In both cases this method fails to furnish sufficient data, and in important cases connoisseurs study the drawing of hands and fingers, ears and such like to find proofs of their ascription of a painting or drawing to a particular artist. At this point we must recall what has already been said of how the basis of the icon is to be thought in a natural portrait painted for quickness’ sake by the encaustic or wax process. We know further that the progress of this form of painting was a striving for depth and richness of colouring as well as in an airy softness of tint in order to gain a life-like impression, its warmth of flesh tints, and the attractive force of the eyes with their look either penetrating or reflective. The contrasted shadows on the cheeks, brow, and nose, and the bright surfaces on the folds of the draperies gave wax-painting opportunity for rendering a close observation of nature. First, a dark tone was laid on, next the shadows put in with a contrasting light blue and the two patches with their different colours and values were softened by the hot iron, pressed out, to some extent mixed, and this very softening process did away with the sharp edges of the first laying on and blended the tones into a general harmony. The laws of icon-painting demand the same effects, but with the egg or tempera technique they can only be attained in a solid fashion by a long process of laying on one coat after another in gradually heightened tones[49].

      43. Saint George (Double-sided icon), Kiev School, end of the 11th century to the beginning of the 12th century.

      Egg tempera on lime wood, 174 × 122 cm.

      The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

      44. The Prophet Elias in the Desert, 14th century.

      Egg tempera on plaster on wood, 35.5 × 28 cm.

      The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

      As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the well-known treatise by the monk Theophilus on various arts was available. It dealt with, in the first chapter, – the mixture of colours for the production of flesh tints, that is, the okhrenie, the colour comprised of white lead, vermilion (cinnabar), red ochre, black, etc., he calls membrana. In this complicated recipe, with its directions as to what should be mixed with which and what must be added later, the part which interests us most is the first coat, which is made of white lead burnt until it gives a yellow or greenish (prasinum) colour[50]. This is precisely the darkish, greenish-olive coat which, both in miniatures and in icon-painting of the Greco-Italian school, forms the first coat and underlies the flesh tint made of a mixture of white lead and vermilion, burnt red ochre, and red lead. The green shows at the edges round the oval of the face and along the nose and makes the shadow; it is for the tenth to thirteenth centuries the mark of Byzantinism in painting. The Greek Painters’ Guide of Dionysius of Fourna shows that the proplasmos of Panselinos might likewise be called okhrenie, being made of white lead, ochre, and green with an addition of black[51]. Flesh colour, when lighted, is made of white lead and red ochre; the region of the eyes beginning with the dark sinking of the orbit is done in black mixed with ochre or umber with red ochre. The Russian Painters’ Guide (Pódlinnik), under the heading ‘how to paint the faces of icons’, gives the following directions: ‘To make sankir, ochre and black: to make the first coat of ochre for faces, mix in white lead, vermilion and red: for the second coat make the ochre lighter: to make shadows mix in a little black and put the shadows in. The icon-painters distinguish, in various styles, sankir of various shades and compositions, but agree in denoting by it a dark tint serving as the ground colour for flesh, yet they do not know the origin and meaning of the word.

      A second criterion of different schools the modern icon-painters themselves find in is the so-called ozhivki (from ozhivát, ‘to enliven’), a special kind of whitish highlight which, in the form of fine, curly or hooked lines of a pale mixture of colours or even actual white, ‘enlivens’ the light places by the eyes, on the forehead, nose, lips, and even on the joints of the fingers. Frequent use of these distinguishes the severe Greek manner of the old schools and their number decreases century by century from the fourteenth to the seventeenth, though they continue to survive right through the course of Russian icon-painting as an accepted convention. As a matter of fact, these ozhivki rarely add to the real effect of the painting by bringing out the appearance of high relief; they merely make the surface spotty and are connected in one’s mind with the severe school. Even in the seventeenth century, in the big independent icons, they cover the prescribed places on the muscles about the eye and upon the forehead with rows of fine patches of pigment, as it were a luxuriance of finishing work without need or sense. In such rows they receive from the icon-painters the name of dvizhki (from dvigat, ‘move’). A great many such little patches in the case of an icon of poor execution gives a look of boniness to faces, fingers, and limbs.

      We have already seen that, in contradiction to the encaustic painting with its rich deep tones[52], there existed the parallel art of wall-painting with its light tones. This occasionally passed into a mere ‘colouring’ or ‘illumination’ of the figures in flat tones with no gradation, meaning there was no real modelling, or merely, a faint lightening of the tones on the big folds of the drapery. This ‘fresco’ scale of light tones finds its way into icon-painting from time to time when the supply of truly iconic models fails, as for instance in the icon-painting of Nóvgorod and northern Russia. The pale style has its coat of pale ochre, whereas the rich colouring has red ochre.

      The Greco-Italian icon-painting in the latter half of the fourteenth century and in the fifteenth had under the hands of Paolo and Lorenzo Veneziano and Catarino worked out a warm iconic colouring which gave rise later to the colouring of the great Giorgione. It was not merely the natural surroundings of Venice, the deep, rich evening colouring of the Venetian lagoons, but also the decorative beauty of Greco-Oriental icons adopted by Greco-Italian icon-painting that, as we shall see below, provided the historical foundation for Venetian colouring. The earliest channels by which the lost period of Greco-Oriental painting exercised its influence were the Korsun’ icons; next we have a series of icons with dark ochre flesh, and this is followed by a great influx of Greco-Italian, more particularly Venetian icons which awoke a lively movement in the Russian schools.

      The unusual phenomenon of two-coloured reflexes in Greco-Italian and Nóvgorod icon-painting was observed long ago, not as ‘reflexes’ or reflexions of complementary light on the folds of drapery, but as a ‘special form of high light’ (probêl[53]) produced not with white but with other colours. So, following the directions of the Russian Podlinnik, he remarks that in Nóvgorod work of the sixteenth century on a garment coloured maroon (bakán) the folds are streaked with blackish green. But when he describes light blue garments as lightened (probêleny) with maroon and dark blue with purplish red (bágor) he is in error. His mistake is due to probêl being essentially a lightening whereas the dark red tints are used for shadows and not for bright areas. We know something of this practice of using brown colours for drapery with bluish reflexes as far back as the early Christian mosaics in Cyprus, the church of S. Praxed at Rome, on the Virgin’s raiment in the chapel of Venantius in the Lateran[54]. Even the Italian fresco of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries knows the use of greenish reflexes on reddish draperies, still earlier in S. Angelo in Formis in the Neapolitan Campagna where it comes from the Greek Orient[55]. It is important to bear in mind that in the true Byzantine

49

It is hardly necessary to recall that the basis of the painting is a layer of gypsum and glue (gesso) spread upon the wood: Dionysius gives directions. Sometimes the wood is first covered with linen: cf. Theophilus, I. xix. See the editions by Hendrie (1847) and Ilg (1874), with English and German translations.

50

As I read it, the membrana (Hendrie reads membrina) or first coat was of yellow burnt white lead, natural white lead, and cinnabar or red ochre: if the face was ruddy, more red; if white, more white; if pale, prasinum was added. While the shadows were put in over this with posch, a mixture of membrana with prasinum, burnt red ochre and a little cinnabar. Next the rosy tints were applied, and after-wards lumina for the highlights by an admixture of white. E. H. M.

51

The Greek Painters’ Guide: This guide to the practice on Mount Athos gives a wonderfully full account of both technical processes and iconography: it is translated in Didron, Manuel d’Iconographie Chrétienne, 1845, Eng. trans, omitting technical first part, 1886: under the influence of the monks and of the famous forger Simonides, Didron referred the guide to the fourteenth or fifteenth century and Manuel Panselinos, who is quoted as the model artist, to the twelfth. Bayet, Rev. Archéologique, iii. 3 (1884), pp. 325-34, makes it probable that he worked in 1535 and that the guide, as we have it, belongs to the eighteenth century. See (modern Greek) preface to the best text published by A. Papadopoulo-Kerameus, St. P. 1909, to which I always refer; cf. Diehl, Manuel, p. 854; Dalton, Byz. Art, p. 649. But it gives a much more ancient tradition, as is shown by its frequent agreement with Theophilus. Our author says it existed in the fifteenth century and may go back to the fourteenth.

52

Sóchnÿya, lit. juicy, Fr. juteux.

53

This is from the root of bêly ‘ white’ and suggests ‘ white showing through’.

54

Kondakov, Iconography of B.V.M., i (1914), pp. 321-3.

55

Salazaro, Studî sui Monumenti d’Italia Meridionale, 1871, Pls. x-xv.