About Alexey Khomyakov’s Views on Church Painting

Abstract

The article is devoted to the views on church painting of one of the Slavophile leaders A.S. Khomyakov. In 1845, Alexander Ivanov, an artist working in Rome, influenced by the “Slavophile” atmosphere of meetings with F.V. Chizhov, N.M. Yazykov and N.V. Gogol, attempted to use an icon as a model for the image of the Resurrection of Christ for the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (for the first time in the history of the Russian academic school). It is doubtful that Khomyakov could have unreservedly welcomed this endeavor by Ivanov. Although he believed that for Russia’s return to nationality it would be sufficient only to revive the old in consciousness and life, he did not at all understand this return as a revival of the authentic forms of Old Russian art or as a stylization of these forms. Khomyakov’s negative attitude to stylizations is evidenced by his sharp criticism of the eclecticism of Bavarian art. In Russia, he believed, the link with tradition had long been severed and therefore Old Russian art could not serve as a basis for a modern art school. Not in Ivanov’s traditional icon-oriented sketch of the Resurrection of Christ, but in his painting The Appearance of the Messiah, Khomyakov recognized, even before he saw it with his own eyes, evidence of the beginning of the revival of truly Russian life and Russian thought. In his opinion, the artist sought in the painting to eliminate personal artistic manner, to become a kind of transparent medium through which the holy image would be imprinted on the canvas. The German Nazarene artists tried to capture the Christian phenomenon in the artistic contemplation of the spirit, but they could only teach it, they themselves were incapable of it. Ivanov, a graduate of the Imperial Academy of Arts, who had perfectly mastered the craft of an artist, was at the same time, according to Khomyakov, a pupil of icon painters, who created a great work of church wall painting. The history of the Russian art school of the second half of the 19th — early 20th century fully confirmed the validity of this assessment of the painting The Apparition of the Messiah. It laid the foundation for the God-seeking direction of Russian painting, on which Russian art blossomed in the work of I.N. Kramskoi, V.M. Vasnetsov, M.V. Nesterov, N.N. Ge, as well as atheists — V.D. Polenov and V.V. Vereshchagin. Although not all the works of this trend were honored to be accepted into the bosom of the Orthodox Church, most of them allow us to be deservedly proud of the Russian art school.