In search of the lost tradition: towards a history of church painting of the 1830s — 1st half of the 1840s

Fast moving Europeanisation of Russia, started by Peter the Great and continued by his successors, showed itself, among other things, in founding the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and in the birth of Russian academic school, whose brilliant achievements were not in the least the legacy of Russian art tradition, especially that of icon-painting, for the latter was only allowed to exist as the arts of the commoners. This state of things was regarded as something to overcome during the reign of Nicholas I, when gradual re-establishment of the ties with tradition begins, seen in particular in the "Byzantine style" in Church architecture, invented by K.A. Ton in late 1820s - early 1830s at the behest of the emperor. Conservative ideology, expressed as it was in the so called theory of the official nationhood (narodnost'), starting from the times when S.S. Uvarov, the author of this theory, was appointed Minister of Public Instruction, was not reflected, however, in the academic Church painting and in the paintings which belonged to historic genre as a whole. This article is focused on the views on the academic Church paintings and traditional icon-paintings that were typical of the educated class of the 1830s and early 1840s. It is shown that the contemporaries of Russian "historical" painters, including those in the Church, saw their calling in commitment to the people (narodnost'), for "there is a need to assume... one's own character, which, while retaining its originality, would tend toward the general harmony with the European Art"; at least a part of the society has come to the opinion that at the time of the decline of famous schools of the West, it is in Russia that paintings show "life and development". (I.V. Kookolnik). In Church paintings of the 1830s the "Russian" style, oriented at the monuments of the past, originated not in the academic school itself, but in the adminicular activity, that is, as a by-product of the artistic and archaeological studies of F.G. Solntsev. A.N. Olenin, the President of the Academy of Arts, on whose intiative these studies were performed, envisaged their outcome as "the complete painting course of archaeology and ethnography for the artists". This course was born in the 1830s during two works of the artist: the making of Church calendar and the painting of Terem Palace and the churches in the Moscow Kremlin.