Hardly less dramatic than the broadening of subject matter and refinement of technique was the development of the iconostasis, or icon screen, Russia's most distinctive contribution to the use of icons. In Byzantium and Kiev, illustrated cloths and icons had often been placed on the central or "royal" doors that connected the sanctuary with the nave of the church and on the screen separating the two. Holy pictures had been painted and carved on the beam above the screen.68 But it is only in Muscovy that one finds the systematic introduction of a continuous screen of icons extending high above the sanctuary screen, representing a kind of pictorial encyclopedia of Christian belief. From at least the end of the fourteenth century, when Rublev and two others designed the beautiful three-tiered iconostasis for the Archangel Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin-the earliest surviving iconostasis-these illustrated screens began to be a regular feature of Russian churches. Beyond the many icons at eye level on the sanctuary screen were added up to six higher rows of icons, often reaching up to the ceilings of new churches.69
The Russian icon screen represented a further extension of the process of humanizing Orthodoxy-offering a multitude of pictorial links between the remote God of the East and the simple hopes of an awakening people. Placed between the sanctuary and the congregation, the icon screen lay "on the boundary between heaven and earth,"70 and depicted the variety of human forms through which God had come from out of His holy place to
redeem His people. Each icon provided an "external expression of the transfigured state of man,"71 a window through which the believing eye could peer into the beyond. The icon screen as a whole provided a pictorial guide to the sanctification which only the church could give.
The tapers that were lit by the faithful to burn in large candelabras before the icon screen throughout and beyond each service transformed the otherwise dark and cold church into a "candlelight kingdom."72 These flickering flames reminded the congregation of the forms which God the Father had mysteriously assumed within the "life-giving Trinity": the Son, who appeared to his apostles as pure light at the Transfiguration prior to His death; and the Holy Spirit, which came to them as pure flame at Pentecost after his final ascension.78
The iconostasis enabled Russians to combine…tbskJpve of beauty..with their sense of history. LinesT5e7alne~1more supple and color richer as icon panels grew larger and the screens more comprehensive. Just as the individual lives of saints were gradually grafted into vast^ chronicles ofLsaered history, so icons were soon mcOfpofatedTnto thesexomprehensive pictorial records of sacred history that moved from Old Testament patriarchs and prophets in the highest row to local saints in Jhe lowest. The panels in the center moved down to man-??????? God Himself-through the Virgin to Christ, who sat at the center of the main "prayer row" of panels immediately over the royal doors. Modeled on the Pantokrator, who had stared down in lonely splendor from the central dome of Byzantine cathedrals, "Christ enthroned" acquired on the Russian iconostasis a less severe expression. The Lord's hitherto distant entourage of holy figures was brought down from the cupola of earlier Byzantine churches and placed in a row on either side of the traditional images of the Virgin and John the Baptist. These newly visible saints were inclined in adoration toward Christ, who, in turn, seemed to beckon the congregation to join their ranks as He looked straight ahead and held out the gospel, usually opened to the text "Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you."74 As if in response, the faithful pressed forward during and after services to kiss as brothers in Christ the saints who stood closest to them on the sacred screen. This, like most acts of worship and veneration in Orthodox Russia, was accompanied by the bow or prostration of humility and by a sweeping, two-fingered sign of the cross: the public confession of faith.
The development of the iconostasis and the intensification of icon veneration in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Russia set off Russian art frorirtliat of Western "Christendom, where holy pictures were viewed increasingly as optional ornaments withouT~anjTatrinSc_lheological s!gnTr£ cance,73 and where artists were rediscovering-rather than movine awav
oi-helief but on the"ccflcreteluustratiori_of_it5-gloiies. The emotional attachment to sacred pictur amp;TrieTps"~e1ipTain why neither the art forms nor the rationalistic philosophy of classical antiquity played any significant role in the culture of early modern Russia. There were no important Russian imitators of the Renaissance art of Italy and Flanders, despite ample contact with both regions; and the rationalistic ideas that were brought into late medieval Russia through Westward-looking Novgorod appealed only to a small, cosmopolitan elite and were consistently banned by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of icons for Muscovite culture. Each icon reminded man of God's continuing involvement in human"" affairs. ??????????? be immediately apprehended even by thosFincapable of reading or reflection. It offered not a message for thought but an illus-tration_JQjj;eassurance of God's power in and over history for men who might otherwise have been completely mired in adversity and despair.
Amidst this sea of pictures, thought tefHed to crystallize In images
icon of God, justas the whole Orthodox Empire is the icon of the heavenly world."7" The icon screen provided, moreover, a model for the hierarchical order of Russian society. Each figure occupied a prescribed position in a prescribed way, but all were xnrrned by their common distance from the God of the sanctuary, and by their dependent relationship to the central panel of Christ enthroned. The term chin ("rank") was used both for the general order of the icon screen, and for the central deesis, or "prayer row," which was the largest, easiest to see, and the source of many of the most famous large icons now in museums. Chin became the general term for prescribed rank in Muscovy, and its verbal form uchiniti the main word for command. By the seventeenth century, this concept had become the basis of an entire social order. Tsar Alexis' law code of 1649 was an almost icono^rajpuc~^iriB^oiTrI5_D"ehaviof-ot each rank in society; and" a few years Iatertre~rjveTrafaTfed a. chin for his hunting'IaiconsT1"
TTussia was fated to maintain hierarchical forms of^jflciety _while progressively sheddjng^tne religious idealism that haaoririnally sanctioned theja^Alexisnfaw code ??!?^?1???1??^??????^?18??, but the iconographic tradition was shattered and the church split even before the end of his reign
in the seventeenth century. Naturalistic figures and theatrical compositions were introduced awkwardly and eclectically from Western models; older icons vanished beneath metal casings and layers of dark varnish; and serpentine rococo frames agitated the icon screen and seemed to constrict the holy figures they surrounded. The traditional chin of Muscovy had been replaced by the chinovnik ("petty bureaucrat") of Petersburg; and icon painting as a sacred tradition, by icon production as a state concession. The icon is only "good for covering pots," proclaimed Vissarion Belinsky in the 1840's,78 pointing the way to the new artistic iconoclasm of the Rus-sianjreyolutionary tradition.
Yet the spell of the_Jconwasnever TOrrroletely broken. Nothing else quite took its place, and Russians remained reluctant to corlceive of painting as men did in the West. Russians remained more interested in the ideal represented by a painting than in its artistic texture. To Dostoevsky, Holbein's "Cjmst in th^Tbnib;7ju^sted'i~denial of Christian faith; Claude Lorraine's "Acis and Galatea," a secular Utopia. The print of Raphael's Sistine,34adonna over his writing desk was the ???????^?^|^?^???1 effortjo_reconcile faith and creative power.79 The revolutionaries themselves looked with the eyes of icon venerators on the heroic naturalism of much nineteenth-century Russian secular painting. Many found a call to revolutionary defiance in the proud expression of an unbowed boy in Repin's famous "Haulers on the Volga." Just as the Christian warriors of an earlier age had made vows before icons in church on the eve of battle, so Russian Revolutionaries-in the words of Lenin's personal secretary-"swore vows in the Tret'iakov Gallery on seeing such pictures."80