By such a foundation Anthony established the basis for the Russian assimilation of the three elements of Byzantine (Byzantine Empire) monasticism: the writings of the early Egyptian and Palestinian monks, the eremitical practices of Mount Athos, and the communal spirituality in the rule of Constantinople's Stoudion monastery. As described by The Russian Primary Chronicle, he favoured the solitary life, marked by superhuman efforts to suppress human passions in a demon-haunted world. Reflecting the Byzantine ascetic tradition, Anthony expressed the basic tension, never fully resolved, between the contemplative's search for God through asceticism and the social responsibilities of the hermit. He realized the moral and psychological pitfalls of solitude and consequently provided hermitages near the monastery. Anthony's institution exerted a wide influence on the Russian Orthodox church and later evolved into the cenobitic (community life) ideal out of which some 50 monks became bishops by the year 1250.
The latter part of Anthony's life was marked by a strained relationship with Izyaslav, who suspected him of conspiring with a rival lord during the stormy years following the death, in 1054, of the forceful grand prince of Kiev, Yaroslav I the Wise.
Moscow school
▪ art
major school of late medieval Russian icon and mural painting that flourished in Moscow from about 1400 to the end of the 16th century, succeeding the Novgorod school as the dominant Russian school of painting and eventually developing the stylistic basis for a national art. Moscow began a local artistic development parallel to that of Novgorod and other centres as it rose to a leading position in the movement to expel the Mongols, who had occupied most of Russia since the mid-13th century. The autocratic tradition of the city fostered from the beginning a preference for abstracted spiritual expression over practical narrative.
The first flowering of the Moscow school occurred under the influence of the painter Theophanes The Greek, who was born and trained in Constantinople (Istanbul), assimilated the Russian manner and spirit at Novgorod, and moved from Novgorod to Moscow about 1400. Theophanes went far beyond contemporary models in complexity of composition, subtle beauty of colour, and the fluid, almost impressionistic rendering of his deeply expressive figures. His achievements instilled in Muscovite painting a permanent appreciation of curving planes. Theophanes' most important successor was the most distinguished of Russia's medieval painters, a monk, Andrey Rublyov (Rublyov, Saint Andrey), who painted pictures of overwhelming spirituality and grace in a style that owes almost nothing to Theophanes except a devotion to artistic excellence. He concentrated on delicacy of line and luminous colour; he eliminated all unnecessary detail to strengthen the impact of the composition, and he constructed remarkably subtle and complex relationships among the few forms that remained. Elements of Rublyov's art are reflected in most of the finest Moscow paintings of the 15th century.
The period from the time of Rublyov's death, about 1430, to the end of the 15th century was marked by a sudden growth in Moscow's prestige and sophistication. The grand dukes of Moscow finally drove out the Mongols and united most of the cities of central Russia, including Novgorod, under their leadership. With the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Moscow, for some time the centre of the Russian Orthodox church, became the virtual centre of Eastern Orthodoxy. An artist whose career reflected the new sophistication was the major painter Dionisy, a layman. Dionisy's compositions, based more on intellect than on an instinctive expression of spirituality, are more arresting than either Theophanes' or Rublyov's. His figures convey an effect of extreme elongation and buoyancy through a drastic reduction, by simplified drawing, to silhouette and through a disparate spacing that spreads them out in a processional effect, breaking with the earlier Russian predilection for tight composition. There is a subtle colour scheme of turquoise, pale green, and rose against darker blues and purples. Perhaps the most significant quality of Dionisy's painting was his ability to emphasize the mystical over the dramatic content of narrative scenes.
The new prestige of the Russian Orthodox church led to an unprecedented seriousness in the mystical interpretation of traditional subject matter; by the mid-16th century there were specific directives from the church based on a new didactic iconography that expounded mysteries, rites, and dogmas. The general stylistic traditions already established were followed throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but icons became smaller and crowded in composition and steadily declined in quality. By the late 16th century much of the former spirituality had been lost, replaced by decorative enrichment and often insipid elegance.
At the beginning of the 17th century the so-called Stroganov school (q.v.) of accomplished Moscow artists assumed the leadership of the last phase of Russian medieval art.
Theophanes The Greek
▪ Byzantine painter
born c. 1330, /40
died 1405
one of the leading late Byzantine painters of murals, icons, and miniatures who influenced the 15th-century painting style of the Novgorod school (q.v.) and the Moscow school (q.v.). His early career was spent in Constantinople and the Crimea, but after c. 1370 he worked in Russia. Although he painted hundreds of works, the only ones that can be certainly attributed to him are frescoes in the Church of the Transfiguration in Novgorod (1378).
Rublyov, Saint Andrey
▪ Russian painter
born c. 1360–70
died c. 1430; canonized 1988; feast day January 29
one of the greatest medieval Russian painters, whose masterpiece is a magnificent icon of “The Old Testament Trinity,” now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Little is known of his life except that he was the assistant of another great painter called Theophanes the Greek, who came to Russia from Constantinople. Fairly late in life, Rublyov became a monk, first at Trinity-St. Sergius at Sergiyev Posad and then at the Andronikov monastery in Moscow (Moscow school). Russian painters did not sign their works until the 17th century, so paintings can be assigned to him only on the basis of written evidence or of style. Written evidence associates with his name wall paintings at Vladimir and Moscow and the panel, or icon, of “The Old Testament Trinity.” By analogy of style a number of other icons can also be attributed to him, the chief of these being panels of St. John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. Peter and the Ascension, done in 1408 for the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Virgin at Vladimir, and others of the Archangel Michael and the Saviour from Zvenigorod, now in the Tretyakov Gallery.