'the golden age of all humanity,' which was to be built in Moscow 'on that very spot where the fate of Russia was resolved by the speech of Abraham Palitsyn.'114 The temple, in turn, was to be dominated by a vast fresco, one half of which was to show the Holy Lands as they appeared in Christ's lifetime, the other to show the Holy Lands as they now
appeared, with Nicholas I in the center as the form taken by the Messiah in His second coming.115 Apparently believing that his project would gain the approval of the Tsar, he made some 250 sketches for murals and icons, including events from secular history and mythology along with sacred subjects.
If the idea of the temple represents a final flight of fantasy, the murals themselves show a deep relation to the problem that had haunted him since beginning his 'Appearance of Christ to the People': how can one depict the perfection of Christ in the world of imperfect men? All the murals were to be built around a monumental series portraying the earthly life of Christ. Under the influence of David Strauss' Life of Christ, which he first read in French translation in 1851, he began to conceive of Christ primarily as a human being, whose story of heroism and suffering had been needlessly complicated and etherealized by the historic churches. Abjuring all traditional models for representing the life of Christ, Ivanov's starkly original sketches show a lonely figure passing through real suffering, cruelty, and indifference. There is no trace of sentimentality or artificial adornment. Christ emerges as an almost totally passive figure surrounded by mobs of people and phalanxes of pharisees, with the scourging and crucifixion treated in particular detail. In only two of the 120 scenes in the published version of the series is there any real animation on the face of Christ. In the wilderness, when he is being tempted by the devil, Christ is seated facing straight ahead in the manner of Christ enthroned on the icons, but he is looking nervously at Satan out of the corner of his eye. In the last picture, which shows Christ on the cross, he is looking straight ahead at the viewer with a weird and piercing look that bespeaks less physical suffering than some terrible unspoken doubt about himself.116
Ivanov recognized that he was plunging on to something entirely new. He insisted that the murals did not belong in any existing church and disavowed all links with the pre-Raphaelites, with whom he is often erroneously compared. He was, he insisted in 1857, the year of his visit to Strauss in Tubingen, attempting to 'unite the techniques of Raphael with the ideas of the new civilization.'117 He wrote to Herzen (who like Gogol before him and Chernyshevsky after him was attempting to enlist support for his efforts) that he was 'trying to create a new path for my art in the sketches,' and later confessed that 'I am, as it were, leaving the old mode of art without having any bedrock for the new.'118 In 1858 he set off, after twenty-eight years of absence, for St. Petersburg to exhibit at last his 'Appearance of Christ to the People' and to solicit the support of the new Tsar for his temple. Disappointed by public indifference upon arrival and exhausted
morally and physically by his strange quest, Ivanov died only a few days after the first showing of his work in St. Petersburg.
Ivanov's 'Appearance of the Messiah' must be judged as a failure by almost any standard. The corrupt figures in the foreground dominate the picture and seem totally indifferent to the distant figure of Christ, who seems strangely insignificant and almost unrelated to the picture. The much-labored face of Christ lacks any clearly defined characteristics and conveys an expression of weakness and even embarrassment.
It is perhaps fitting that this final artistic legacy of a monumental and prophetic age should be dominated by the figure of John the Baptist, who stands at the center of the canvas as its most majestic personality. The day of John the Baptist had been the most elaborate official holiday of Russian higher masonry. Chaadaev had encouraged Russians to believe that 'great things have come from the desert' and had written on the title page of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that 'I am not the savior, but he who announces his coming.'119 Ivanov had tried first to create and then to become Christ, but he had left behind only sketches of human suffering and a noble failure dominated by the ascetic prophet who can do no more than announce that someone mightier is coming.
John the Baptist was known in Russia as 'the forerunner' {predtecha), a designation that seems particularly appropriate for Ivanov. His vision of universal Russian rule aided by 'public artists' and adorned with 'temples of humanity' seems at times like an anticipation of Soviet ideology. His initial stylistic experimentation anticipates the emancipated search for new art forms in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. His final realism and preoccupation with suffering helped usher in the bleak, semi-photographic style that was to dominate painting until the 1890's. Nonetheless, for all his qualities as a prophet and precursor, Ivanov stands at the end rather than the beginning of an age. His life and work represent a final heroic effort to attain a kind of moralistic self-transformation into the likeness of Christ.
Ivanov's failure to find a new religious philosophy-or a philosophical religion-represents the frustration of a pursuit that had begun in higher order Masonry. Higher order Masonry was known to its adepts as the 'royal art';120 and the prophetic artists of the Nicholaevan era had sought to find the art forms for the new kingdom. But no one was yet sure what kind of a kingdom it would be, and artists tended to become either haunted by the God they had lost or driven to madness in pursuit of His inner secrets. Ivanov's failure only posed in more dramatic terms the nagging question that Herzen had asked as early as 1835:
Where is our Christ? Are we students without a teacher, apostles without a Messiah? 121
In their anguish, thinkers of the late Nicholaevan era looked for a messiah almost everywhere: in the person of Nicholas I (Ivanov), the holy wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, suffering Poland (Mickiewicz), the Ukrainian peasantry (Shevchenko), or among the ascetic elders of the Optyna Pustyn (Kireevsky). The religious works of Gogol and Ivanov made Christ no longer appear to be a source of deliverance or tenderness. Ivanov's picture of Christ as a lonely, suffering, and uncertain man was reflected and magnified in subsequent nineteenth century paintings: suffering predominating in the work of Ge, brooding loneliness in that of Kramskoy. The seductive thought that the aristocratic reformer himself might prove to be the messiah was suggested by Pleshcheev, the prophetic 'first poet' of the Petrashevsky circle in the late forties, who exhorted that confused circle of reformers to 'believe that thou shalt meet, like the Savior, disciples along the way.'122
As if to clear the stage for new and less narrowly aristocratic movements, the brief period from 1852 to 1858 claimed the lives of a host of gifted figures of the Nicholaevan age: Nadezhdin, Chaadaev, Granovsky, Gogol, Ivanov, Aksakov, and Kireevsky. None of these were old men; but they had burnt themselves out like those who had died even earlier and at much younger ages: Venevitinov, Pushkin, Stankevich, Lermontov, and Belinsky. Out of their collective effort had come an art that was truly national and rich in prophetic overtones. Khomiakov, who was himself to die in i860, wrote the epitaph for this chapter of Russian culture in a letter of 1858 on the occasion of Ivanov's death:
He was in painting what Gogol was in writing and Kireevsky in philosophy. Such people do not live long, and that is not accidental. To explain their death it is not enough to say that the air of the Neva hangs heavy or that cholera enjoys honorary citizenship in Petersburg . . . another cause leads these laborers prematurely to the grave. Their work is not mere personal labor. . . . These are powerful and rich personalities who lie ill not just for themselves; but in whom we Russians, all of us, are compressed by the burden of our strange historical development.123
The Missing Madonna
The waning of classical form in art and life was one of the many fateful results of the reign of Nicholas I. His official ideologists-Uvarov and Pletnev-had found the literary heritage of classical antiquity largely
incompatible with the new doctrine of official nationality. The continued loyalty of the aristocratic intellectuals
