In the Armoury and other studios Russian artists worked alongside foreign painters, including the Pole Stanislaw Loputskii and the Germans (or Dutch?) Daniel Wuchters (in Russia 1663-7) and 'master of perspective' Peter Engels (i670-80s).[360] Western artists introduced oil painting on canvas and new biblical and historical subjects, including scenes from classical history, for the interiors of secular buildings. Unfortunately, too little of their work survives to pass judgement on their skills or to define precisely their influence. Russian artists' receptiveness to the outside world and ability to work in a fully-fledged Western style were limited by Orthodox artistic conventions, lack of travel opportunities, inadequate technical knowledge and ignorance of classical history and mythology. As far as we know, there were no master works for them to copy. Where the use of foreign models is well documented, for example, simplified imitations of plates from Piscator's illustrated Bible, they worked mainly in a religious context.[361]
In 1683 a separate Armoury workshop for non-religious art (zhivopisnaia palata) was established under Ushakov's directorship.[362] Armoury employment rolls for 1687-8 record twenty-seven ikonopistsy and forty zhivopistsy, the latter making maps and charts, prints, banners, theatrical scenery (for Tsar Alexis's short-lived theatre: see below) and decorating such items as furniture, Easter eggs, chess sets and children's toys. Icon painters diversified their skills. In a petition of 1681, for example, Vasilii Poznanskii announced that he was adept at both ikonopis' and zhivopis' and could do historical subjects, 'perspective' studies and portraits.[363]
The introduction of the secular portrait (parsuna or persona, the term borrowed from Latin via Polish) was a significant innovation.[364] The earliest known examples, posthumous images of Prince Mikhail Skopin-Shuiskii and Tsar Fedor Ivanovich (1630s?), were icon-like studies in tempera on wood.[365] Freestanding likenesses of Russians painted in oils on canvas depicting persons detached from an iconic composition or a dynastic cycle are extremely rare before the 1680s. Although there is documentary evidence of parsuny being painted in the i650s-i660s, extant examples are elusive. Not one of Ushakov's portraits survives, for example. The first written reference to a Russian artist doing a portrait from life is Fedor Iur'ev's non-extant study of Tsar Alexis of 1671.[366] The largest surviving collection of portraits are the Russian and foreign rulers in the Book of Titled Heads (Tituliarnik), a sort of dynastic reference work produced for the Foreign Office by Armoury artists in 1672-3. The images are highly stylised, identifying individuals by inscriptions and appropriate regalia.
Little distinguishes Tsar Alexis from twelfth-century Prince Vladimir Mono- makh.47
A key period in the evolution of the parsuna portrait was the short reign of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich (i676-82), which saw the further spread of Polish cultural influences. In i677 Fedor ordered portraits for the tombs of Tsars Michael and Alexis from Fedor Zubov and in 1682 two half-length portraits of his father from Ivan Saltanov. Rare 'naive' equestrian studies of Michael and Alexis, painted in tempera on canvas but with gold icon-like backgrounds, also date from Fedor's reign.48 In 1678 Ivan Bezmin went to the palace to paint the tsar (pisal gosudarskuiu personu).49
The best-known surviving oil painting of Tsar Alexis may date from this time. This stiff and stylised Byzantine image of the tsar in his regalia suggests some development towards three-dimensionality in the background and in the moulding of the face. Both it and a posthumous portrait on a wooden panel of Fedor himself, made for placing by his tomb, are reminiscent of similarly static and decorative panel portraits of Tudor kings and queens painted in England more than a century earlier, with attention devoted to sumptuous fabrics, gems and regalia.50
From the 1680s boyars, too, appear in easel portraits modelled on the stiffly formal 'Sarmatian' portraits of nobles in Poland-Lithuania and Ukraine.51 An image engraved from a painting of Prince Vasilii Vasil'evich Golitsyn (c. 1687), attributed to the Ukrainian Leontii Tarasevich, with its coat of arms and heraldic verses, is wholly in this Polish-Ukrainian manner.52 Golitsyn, one of the few Russians to know Latin, also owned 'German' prints, maps, musical instruments, foreign books, clocks, furniture and mirrors. He amassed a portrait gallery, as did another boyar, Artamon Matveev. Matveev, who had a Scottish wife, also staged home theatricals and hired a foreign tutor to teach his son Latin and Greek.53
47 See V Kostsova, 'Tituliarnik sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha', Trudy Gosu- darstvennogo Ermitazha 3 (1959): 16-40; Cracraft, Imagery, pp. 68-70; Kostotchkina, 'Baroque', pp. 82-4.
48 Ovchinnikova, Portret, pp. 27-8; Danilova and Mneva, 'Zhivopis'', p. 457.
49 A. E. Viktorov, Opisanie zapisnykh knigibumagstarinnykh dvortsovykhprikazov, 1584-1725 g., 2 vols. (Moscow: Arkhipov, 1883), vol. 11, p. 446.
50 Hughes, 'Images', 177; Kampfer, Herrscherbild, pp. 214, 242; Briusova, Russkaiazhivopis', plate 36.
51 See L. I. Tananaeva, 'Portretnye formy v Pol'she i v Rossii v XVII v. Nekotorye sviazi i paralleli', Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie '81 (1982), pp. 85-125; Cracraft, Imagery, pp. 190-1; Hughes, 'Images', i72-3.
52 Lindsey Hughes, Sophia Regent of Russia 1657-1704 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
i990), pp. i44-5.
53 On Golitsyn: Lindsey Hughes, Russia and the West, the Life of a Seventeenth-Century West- ernizer, Prince V. V. Golitsyn (1643-1714) (Newtonville, Mass.: ORP, 1984); A. Smith, 'The
Both these men were exceptional. Even allowing for high rates of destruction of noble property overthe centuries, the meagre evidence ofportraits from the seventeenth century undermines attempts to demonstrate their 'wide distribution ... not only in the capital but also in the provinces'.54 James Cracraft describes Muscovite parsuny as 'exceedingly provincial and even regressive by contemporary Western European standards'.55 We should add, however, that 'Western European standards' were by no means uniformly professional and that 'naive' portraits painted by semi-trained or untaught provincial artists remained the norm outside court circles all over Europe. The point is that in Russia portraits were still a novelty whereas in much of Western Europe they were commonplace.
The gap between Russia and the West was at its widest in respect of female portraits. Recent studies argue that Muscovite royal women were empowered by religious symbolism and rhetoric; for example, the murals in their reception chamber in the Kremlin featured images ofstrong female rulers from the Bible and Byzantium.56 But likenesses of living women remained a rarity as long as elite women were kept in semi-seclusion. The first known free-standing female portraits in Muscovy depict the exceptional figure of Tsarevna Sophia, regent 1682-9. A version engraved in Amsterdam was even surrounded by seven allegorical Virtues and verses in Latin (see Plate 28). All Sophia's portraits emphasised traditional attributes of rulership, as symbolised by regalia in the setting of a double eagle.57 Celebrations of female beauty and sexuality were out of the question in Russia and remained so for some time. While late seventeenth-century England enjoyed the 'age of the pin-up', with prints of royal mistresses and assorted actresses (sometimes nude) widely available for sale, most Muscovite women remained faceless.58 The few known oil
361
For example, the
364
See Lindsey Hughes, 'Images of the Elite: A Reconsideration of the Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Russia',