Art & Architecture - Moscow - page 410

Avant-garde ideas are officially out of favour with the institution of socialist realism.
Architecture tends toward bombastic neoclassicism.
1985
The policy of glasnost , or openness, gradually allows for more freedom of expression
by artists and architects, who begin to explore diverse styles and themes.
Visual Arts
Art is busting out all over Moscow, with the ongoing expansion of the Pushkin Museum of
Fine Arts and the countless new contemporary art galleries that are taking over the city's
former industrial spaces.
Icons
Up until the 17th century, religious icons were Russia's key art form. Originally painted by
monks as a spiritual exercise, icons are images intended to aid the veneration of the holy
subjects they depict, and are sometimes believed able to grant luck, wishes or even miracles.
They're most commonly found on the iconostasis (screen) of a church.
Traditional rules decreed that only Christ, the Virgin, angels, saints and scriptural events
could be depicted by icons - all of which were supposed to be copies of a limited number of
approved prototype images. Christ images include the Pantokrator (All-Ruler) and the
Mandilion, the latter called 'not made by hand' because it was supposedly developed from
the imprint of Christ's face on St Veronica's handkerchief. Icons were traditionally painted
in tempera (inorganic pigment mixed with a binder such as egg yolk) on wood.
The beginning of a distinct Russian icon tradition came when artists in Novgorod started
to draw on local folk art in their representation of people, producing sharply outlined figures
with softer faces and introducing lighter colours, including pale yellows and greens. The
earliest outstanding painter was Theophanes the Greek (1340-1405), or Feofan Grek in Rus-
sian. Working in Byzantium, Novgorod and Moscow, Theophanes brought a new delicacy
and grace to the form. His finest works are in the Annunciation Cathedral of the Moscow
Kremlin.
Andrei Rublyov (1370-1430), a monk at the Trinity Monastery of St Sergius and An-
dronikov Monastery, was the greatest Russian icon painter. His most famous work is the
dreamy Old Testament Trinity, in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery.
The layperson Dionysius, the leading late-15th-century icon painter, elongated his figures
and refined the use of colour. Sixteenth-century icons were smaller and more crowded, their