*The famed early-twelfth-century 'Vladimir Mother
plates i-ii°f God' (Plate I) has long been the most revered of
Russian icons: and the restoration of the original composition (completed in 1918) revealed it to be one of the most beautiful as well. Originally painted in Constantinople, the icon was believed to have brought the Virgin's special protective power from the 'new Rome' to Kiev, thence to Vladimir, and finally to Mpscow, the 'third Rome,' where it has remained uninterruptedly since 1480.
This icon was one of a relatively new Byzantine type emphasizing the relationship between mother and child; it was known and revered in Russia as 'Our Lady of Tenderness.' Characteristic of this general type was the 'Virgin and Child Rejoicing' (Plate II), a mid-sixteenth-century painting from the upper Volga region. The downward sweep of the Virgin's form conveys in visual terms the spiritual temper of the icon's place of origin: combining physical exaggeration with a compassionate spirit. The liberation and semi-naturalistic portrayal of the infant's arms are designed to heighten the rhythmic flow of sinuous lines into an increasingly abstract, almost musical composition.
'*Sm**:,*
PLATE I
PLATE III
LATE II
PLATE IV
icons of the Virgin and Child were the various repre-
sentations of the Virgin on the icon screens of °
Muscovy. The third picture in this series shows the plates ?-iv
Virgin as she appears to the right of Christ on the
central tryptich (deesis) of a sixteenth-century screen.
The richly embossed metal surface, inlaid with jewels,
that surrounds the painted figure is typical of the
increasingly lavish icon-veneration of the period. This
icon, presently in the personal collection of the Soviet
painter P. D. Korin, bears the seal of Boris Godunov,
who presumably used it for private devotions.
The picture to the left illustrates the survival of the theme of Virgin and Child amidst the forced preoccupation with socialist themes and realistic pofmntare~ amp;f~th~eSoviet era. This painting of 1920 (popularly known as 'Our Lady of Petersburg' despite its official designation of 'Petersburg, 1918'), with its unmistakable suggestion of the Virgin and Child standing in humble garb above the city of Revolution, continues to attract reverent attention in the Tret'iakov Gallery of Moscow. It is the work of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who had studied under Leonid Pasternak, illustrator of Tolstoy and father of Boris Pasternak. Petrov-Vodkin turned from painting to teaching for the same reason that the poet Pasternak turned to translating-to keep his integrity during the oppressive period of Stalinist rule; both men attracted talented young followers and quietly passed on to later generations some sense of the older artistic traditions and spiritual concerns of Russian culture.
I
/ '' The Vatican-supported Polish offensive against Orthodox Slavdom
I served mainly to stimulate an ideological and national rising in Muscovy
| which drove out the Poles and gradually united Russia behind the new
/ Romano^Jynasty. Fotjnore^Jhanthree… hundred years the Romanovs
reignei^yen if they did notjdways rule or ever fully escape the shadows
cast by the dark times in which they came to power. From early ballads
through early histories into the plays and operas of the late imperial period,
the Time of Troubles came to be thought of as a period of suffering for the
sins of previous tsars and of foreboding for tsars yet to come. The name of
Marina Mnishek, Dmitry's Polish wife, became a synonym for 'witch' and
'crow': the Polish mazurka-allegedly danced at their wedding reception
in the Kremlin-became a leitmotiv for 'decadent foreigner' in Glinka's
Life for the Tsar and later musical compositions. The anti-Polish and anti-
'Catholic tone of almost all subsequent Russian writing about this period
faithfully reflects a central, fateful fact: that Muscovy achieved unity after
the~Tfoubles of the early seventeenth century primarily through xeno-
, phobia, particularly toward the Poles.
Operatic romanticism about the national levee en masse against the Polish invader has, however, too long obscured the fact that the price of Russian^ictory was increased dependence on Protestant Europe. The subtle stream 'of Protestant influence flowed in from three different sources: beleaguered Protestants in nearby Catholic countries, militant Sweden, and the more distant and commercially oriented 'Germans' (England, Holland, Denmark,
