http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/arts/ ... html?8hpib
Art Review | 'Sacred Arts and City Life'
Russian City's Sacred and Secular Visions
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: November 18, 2005
BALTIMORE, Nov. 11 - St. Andrew the Fool was, at first, nonplussed. Keeping vigil one night in a church where the robes of the Mother of God were preserved, he saw the Virgin unfurl her veil over the congregation. He turned to a companion. "Do you see what I see?" His friend was young; the hour was late. Maybe he saw; maybe he didn't. But to Andrew, all was now clear. The wardrobe was in use; the Virgin was in residence.
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
"St. George and the Dragon," a 15th-century work in tempera on wood.
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Iconostasis doors from the late 15th or early 16th century, with the Annunciation, St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom.
Andrew had his vision in Constantinople in the 9th or 10th century. Six hundred years later, when an artist in northern Russia painted an image of it, the vision happened again, in the picture. That's the way icons work. They aren't just records of the past; they're live events in a constant present, déjà vu in reverse.
In such wonder-working objects - "art" on the static Western model isn't really the word for them - martyrs bleed warm blood; the Virgin weeps salt tears. Communication is intimate and interactive. You look at icons, and they look at you. You talk to them, and they answer. In such transactions, belief runs deep and emotions run high. The gulf between heaven and earth dissolves.
"Sacred Arts and City Life: The Glory of Medieval Novgorod," which opens on Saturday at the Walters Art Museum here, negotiates precisely that divide. Cogent, propulsive, quite unlike the Guggenheim's Russian extravaganza, the show illuminates two overlapping realms: the secular life of a once-grand commercial city; and the religious life of the same city, which was itself in some sense a giant icon, a sacred space.
Situated far in the north of Russia, Novgorod began as a trading post blessed with an ideal site, at the juncture of rivers connecting it to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Its merchants shipped timber and furs to the world. The world sent back gold, silver, textiles and, after the city's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 988, a new religious art.
The ultimate source of that art was Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. Yet by the time its fine-grained imperial styles reached Russia, they had picked up all kinds of other styles - Slavic, Asian, Western European - along the way. The result was a hybrid aesthetic, with distinctive flair and refinements. The same was true of Novgorod's secular art, which had roots in local, pagan soil.
Secular art accounts for roughly half the show. And over all, it is the sort of dug-up, beat-up everyday stuff that used to land on the archaeological scrap heap rather than in the nice, clean art museums. For understanding history such material is indispensable, of course. Worth noting is that a lot of it is also beautiful.
Certainly that's true of some of the jewelry here: a jazzy necklace of colored glass beads, possibly from the Near East; a silver necklace with a Scandinavian twist; and a cast bronze pendant of a two-headed horse with tinkling chimes for feet.
From farther down in the city's ancient strata come 10th-century coins minted in England, Flanders, France and Germany, suggesting the geographic reach of Novgorod's enterprise. But most revealing of all are personal items: slippers, toys, musical instruments and, extraordinarily, letters written on birch-bark strips.
In one letter, dating from the mid-12th century, a monk apologizes to a ticked-off colleague for missing an appointment. With tweaks of style, the message could have been lifted from a New York answering machine.
"You are angry for no reason," the writer begins. "Father Superior would not let me come." And he concludes: "It hurts me that you spoke ill to me. I bow to you, my brother, even though you say such things about me. You are mine, and I am yours."
Another letter appears to be an artist's note-to-self about a fresh commission, for an image of Christ surrounded by saints. We know who this artist was: Olisei Petrovich, nicknamed "Grechin," or the Greek, one of the busiest of the many busy icon painters in Novgorod in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.
Indeed, it was as an ecclesiastical center that the city gained mythic status. Visitors were awed by its density of monasteries and churches. They shivered at the thunderous toll of its countless bells. They marveled at the presence of icons everywhere: adorning shops, lining streets, turning homes into minicathedrals.
As for church interiors, each was a flickering gallery of celestial images, culminating in a floor-to-ceiling wall of icons called the iconostasis. In Russian Orthodox tradition, this is a barrier separating the congregation from the altar, the human from the divine. And like many features of liturgical art, its purpose is control. It enhances and protects religion's most potent psychological resource: mystery.
Yet few of the individual icons in the show are intimidating. To the contrary, they seem welcoming of your company. For sure this is true of a lithe young St. George the dragon slayer in a 15th-century painting that has the graphic punch of a movie poster. He practically leaps out of the frame as he skewers his prey with a cool, self-confident, heartthrob's smile.
St. Nicholas was another favorite, a fatherly type who brokered marriages and averted disasters at sea. To cure a headache, you might appeal to an icon of John the Baptist, or St. Boniface if excessive drinking was a concern. For devotees gripped by a craze for wealth, the ex-sorcerer St. Cyprian, wise in the ways of "gold enchantment," brought relief.
Certain figures like St. Basil were all-purpose and popular, though he comes across as standoffish and tense in a set of panels that pair him with an equally forbidding John Chrysostom. You might guess the artist was trying to warm them up by giving them Rudi Gernreich caftans. In fact, he was doing the opposite: flattening them, abstracting them, reducing them into patterns-on-patterns, taking them out of this fleshly world.
Out-of-this-world is the icon direction. Most of the paintings, simultaneously sumptuous and dematerializing, are already halfway there. It makes perfect sense that a picture of the Op-Art St. Basil was originally part of the door of an iconostasis, that he was a watcher at the gate between here and beyond.
The Walters show ends, in a crescendo of visual glory, with an iconostasis of its own, or rather a simulation of one assembled from a dozen or so large icons covering a gallery wall. Everyone who is anyone is on hand: apostles, evangelists, prophets, saints, the Virgin, with Christ in majesty above them all.
He's a forcible figure: a great mantis with a tiny head, crooked arms and legs and a carapace of a robe. The throne he sits on is transparent - clear glass, or cut crystal, perhaps - while an oval braided rug spread beneath or behind him seems to add a homely, folkish touch.
There's something funny about that rug, though. You don't notice right away; then you do. It isn't woven from cloth; it's made from the swarming bodies of minute blue angels, hovering and jostling wing to wing. Once you see this, the whole fabric starts to stir and vibrate, projecting the throne and its august occupant out of the picture. Are we hallucinating? Are they going to land right here in front of us? You and I may retain our doubts; Andrew, no fool, would say: but, of course.
"Sacred Arts and City Life: The Glory of Medieval Novgorod" opens at the Walters Art Museum, 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore, (410) 547-9000, tomorrow, and remains on view through Feb. 12.