narration and ritualization in the icons of medieval...

Narration and Ritualization in the Icons of Medieval Rus' ALYSSA DEBLASIO UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

H agiographical narratives are a vital part of many of the world’s religious institutions and, following Vladimir’s Christianization of Rus' in 988, pictorial representations

of saints’ lives on icons became an important tool of medieval Ortho-doxy. The rich legacies of icon painting in Byzantium and Rus' al-lowed visual hagiography, over centuries of development, to emerge as a distinctive subgenre of iconography. This subgenre, although intertwined with written hagiography as the two ultimately share the same religious canon, played a much different role since the commu-nities of medieval Rus' were predominately illiterate. The role of the icon painter, as a mediator between society and the divine, was to send a clear and didactic message to these communities through visual manifestations of Orthodox faith. Creating an effective icon required the very particular fashioning of a Saint’s image to correspond with the Church’s written canon. This ritualistic craftsmanship, however, was a ritual independent of religious texts, regardless of the interde-pendence of the two. Though icons played a crucial role in the con-version of Rus', there is no single theoretical model that can account for the role of the icon in society, in the religious community, and in Church doctrine. Erwin Panofsky’s iconography, by the late twentieth century the most commonly used methodology for reading religious icons, rightfully maintains that every spatial unit of the icon has mean-ing. His method, however, has no interest in addressing the theologi-cal semiotics that Saint Augustine provides in On Christian Doctrine, or the nuances of perspective detailed in Boris Uspenskii’s The Semiotics of the Russian Icon. Augustine and Uspenskii’s methods, while providing sign theories helpful for decoding religious symbolism, lack the notion of ritualized hierarchy found in the work of Jonathan Z. Smith. The use of Smith’s ritual theory in conjunction with the leading theorists in the field of medieval iconography allows the viewer to read an icon based not only on the content of individual scenes, or on its integrity to corresponding written hagiography, but as a unique system of signs.

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These signs, encoded ritualistically and hierarchically in an image, play a vital role in the Orthodox canon as religious tools and witnesses to the life and miracles of a saint.

Icons of saints, although often very similar to their hagiographical counterparts, offer their own unique and independent pictorial hagiographies.1 Both do not correlate to the modern sense of biography but instead are projects with the purpose of matching a collection of words and images to one ultimate end: “the ineffable holiness of a saint” (Hahn 30). Although visual hagiographies are not entirely fictionalized, they are guided by Church canons and the Church’s intention to represent, through the work of the icon painter, a very particular religious sentiment that “will rise above mere words and deeds to reflect the grace of the saint, the holy coronation that the saint receives at death, and his admission into the heavenly court” (30). Within this unique relationship between text, artist, and community, ritualization is found on all three levels: 1.) in a particular icon and its relationship to the larger religious canon, 2.) in the rela-tionship between icons and the Rus'ian religious community, and 3.) in the relationship between the icon painter and his icon.

The Church proclaimed its authority on the relationship be-tween visual and written religious texts, the first level in which rituali-zation can be found, at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787. This council was convened specifically to address and refute iconoclasm (Eikonoklasmos, or “image-breaking”), “the heresy that in the eighth and ninth centuries caused the last of the many breaches with Rome that prepared the way for the schism of Photius, and was echoed on a smaller scale in the Frankish kingdom in the West” (Catholic Encyclope-dia). The Council stated that icons were to serve as dogmatic expres-sions of canonical doctrine, and that images, as well as written and pictorial religious texts, must be in complete correspondence with one another: “if the one is shown by the other, the one is incontestably made clear by the other” (Ouspensky and Lossky 32). Pictorial hagi-ography does depend on the written vitae initially, since without an introduction to a Saint’s written hagiography, “the pictorial represen-tation of the patron saint could not be understood—particularly so since the iconography of figures in the Eastern Church resorted to many symbols” (Onasch 181). After hearing or reading the vitae, how-ever, the viewer only needs to read the kleima, the rows of pictures framing the portrait, which provided selections from the vita, in order to recognize the narrative of the scenes and begin the task of decod-

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ing the embedded signs of pictorial hagiography (181). Although the Church claimed that image and text should be entirely compatible with each another, religious images developed their own unique role within the community. The stability of religious icons as religious tools and symbols of faith presupposed the ability of the masses to interpret their encoded meanings. Like the cult of saints, a cult of images existed in medieval Rus', and religious images were used suc-cessfully by the Church to increase devotion and attract new believers (Hahn 12). Images, if sufficiently understandable and properly under-stood (according to Church doctrine), had the ability to affect the lives of the overwhelmingly illiterate Rus'ians in ways that verbal texts could not.

As early as the fifth century, St. Nilus of Sinai wrote that icons were placed in churches “so that the illiterate who are unable to read the Holy Scriptures may, by gazing at the pictures, become mind-ful of the faith” (qtd. Mango 33). In a letter to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, Pope Gregory makes the same statement about his reli-gious community: “What a book is to those who can read, a picture is to the ignorant people who look at it. Because in a picture even the unlearned may see what example they should follow; in a picture they who know no letters may yet read” (qtd. Baxandall 41). Icons were more accessible to the community than written hagiography, and thus icons were important ideological tools in an overwhelmingly illiterate society.2 The public and the clergy treated icons in the same way that they treated sacred texts: they were kissed, placed in holy places in the home, incense was shaken over them, and candles and lamps were lit before them. Praying to icons was one of the two ways that the typi-cal Medieval Rus'ian could attempt to ensure his personal safety, along with the safety of his family and his property: the other way was to seek assistance from sorcery or black magic. Icons that had deterio-rated were placed in a river to drift away,3 a practice comparable to the Rus'ian folk tradition of water rites and burials. As Catherine Bell’s notes in “The Power of Ritualization,” rituals are created to exercise a particular type of social control over the population. The ritualization surrounding icons was no different, as the codification of how to treat an icon guided conduct and clearly delineated the boundaries of or-thodox ideology with very particularly proscribed practices.

In an attempt to decode and trace the narratives of medieval images, Panofsky brought popularity to his tripartite system for read-ing icons, called iconography. This system was, by 1934, already in

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use in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton. It marked the beginning of the beneficial institutional practice of examining every detail of a piece of art. Works were first catalogued by “readers” following a strict series of rules and indexes; they pro-ceeded, “insofar as possible, from left to right, from top to bottom, accurately and economically identifying all persons, props, and actions in a given pictorial field in their interrelations” (Sears 140). Next, the readers attempted to discern the meaning of the work by linking pic-torial motifs with literary themes. In the third and final stage, the reader “relie[d] on ‘synthetic intuition’ and examine[d] a work as symptomatic of the attitudes and mental habits of a culture and time” (140-1).4 Though Panofsky’s system was revolutionary in art history and was the first to focus on seemingly unimportant details in pictorial narratives, his method often underestimates and even alto-gether ignores the religious function of holy artifacts in favor of an excessive reliance on “specific themes and concepts as transmitted through literary sources, whether acquired by reading or by oral tradi-tion” (Panofsky 35). Panofsky misinterprets pictorial hagiography as secular “allegory” (35) and neglects its theological objective.

What is lacking in Panofsky’s iconography, in part, is the commitment to a semiotic theology of religious medieval objects found in Augustine. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine outlines the first comprehensive system for the interpretation of signs in religious texts. Although this system focuses itself most specifically on scrip-ture, Augustine created a medieval sign theory that lends itself to the understanding and deciphering of religious texts of all kinds. “A sign,” he writes, “is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses” (24). Signs imply transference of meaning and intention for the purpose of conveying “the motion of their spirits or something which they have sensed or understood” (35). Signs in art and literature, as opposed to those in interpersonal communication, are deliberately encoded into their respective works by a calculating hand. These encodings are often not apparent upon first glance, making it easy for the interpreter to fall into what Augustine calls “the absurdity of wicked mean-ings” (7). He proposes the goal of avoiding these pitfalls by learning how to decipher the many nuances of the embedded sign.

For Augustine, any analogy between text and art is a danger-ous one when the subject matter is the religious, as he was notoriously wary of sacred writing in any form other than the Scriptures. In Har-


mony of the Gospels 1.10.16 he warns against the inferior capacity of reli-gious images to convey the integrity of their written counterparts, stressing that Christ does not exist on the walls of the church but only in the Scriptures. The analogizing of visual and verbal religious texts, however, was not uncommon in medieval Europe nor centuries ear-lier: Cicero, in On the Orator, wrote that the Sophists arranged their words as painters do the various colors on their palettes; in Republic X, Plato uses the analogy that the philosopher-statesman mixes his pig-ments in order to paint the good city. Despite Augustine’s warnings to be cautious of the religious image, his sign theory is equally appro-priate in the study of religious icons with the acceptance of the idea that, when discussing the cult of images in Rus', “medieval and mod-ern scholars alike shift readily between text and image” (Hahn 12). The link between these two mediums is narrative, and narrative in both works toward the same end, only in different ways.

The accurate decoding of medieval images requires a method of interpretation that recognizes the complexity of the religious sign. The reader must understand that each unit of the icon points to some-thing beyond itself but does not necessarily signify the thing to which it refers. Augustine provides the example of the Latin word “Deus” in On Christian Doctrine. He writes that “although He is not recognized in the noise of these two syllables, all those who know the Latin lan-guage, when this sound reaches their ears, are moved to think of a certain most excellent immortal nature” (11). In order to better inter-pret Rus'’ iconographic works, signs must be understood as testimoni-als to something more sublime than themselves. Signs are imperfect reflections of what is beyond them and often hold no direct connec-tion to what they represent outside of a common consciousness: Deus, to Latin speakers, points to God, while for those who know no Latin it is devoid of all meaning. The icon is made of narrative threads that the artist has “tangle[d] and untangle[d], cross[ed] and re-cross[ed], in accordance with a carefully prearranged plan of narrative coincidence and interdependencies that [were] not immediately apparent to the reader-viewer, but, upon further reflection on the text and gloss, illu-minate[d] their meaning” (Lewis 54). The signs within this narrative structure do not all point toward a concise, concrete idea, but convey religious sentiment and mystical patterning: “the threads … diverge to form a broad and spacious tapestry”—an image in line with the con-science of the Church (Ryding 16). The reader of the icon must un-derstand that religious signs are arranged according to a hierarchy—

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this hierarchy is one in which every sign strives toward the top, to-ward the most ideal and the most contemplated, and toward a less easily apprehended instance of which the signs are illustrations. Pan-ofsky’s method, too dependent on its analogizing art to literary im-agery, does not allow the reader to place theology at the top of the hierarchy, and, in a sense, fell victim to the “wicked meanings” against which Augustine so staunchly cautioned.

The meticulous encoding of signs into icons and the impor-tant role of icons among the Orthodox community of believers is ap-parent in an examination of the family of icons portraying St. Nicho-las. St. Nicholas was one of the most widely venerated saints both in medieval Rus' and throughout the world, adored under a variety of different names by Christians and Muslims alike. In the Church’s li-turgical weekly cycle only the mother of God, John the Precursor, and St. Nicholas are mentioned by name (Ouspensky and Lossky 123). The Orthodox Church sees him as “a personification of a Shepard, of its defender and intercessor” (123). “The special veneration of this bishop, who left neither theological works nor other writings” (123) is a testament to the phenomenal power of icons as aids in religious pro-liferation. Because St. Nicholas did not produce anything from his own hand that could be disseminated after his death, his legacy de-pended entirely on his written and pictorial hagiography. There is an astonishingly large variety of St. Nicholas icons and although these images are not disconnected from Orthodoxy’s textual narratives of his life and deeds, they have the benefit of allowing the illiterate masses to recognize and read the life of St. Nicholas without words. No two icons of St. Nicholas are identical, but they are always identifi-able as icons within the same family. Newly Christianized Rus'ians were consistently able recognize the image of St. Nicholas, thus rein-forcing a sense of Turnerian communitas. For Victor Turner, “structure tends to be pragmatic and this-worldly … while communi-tas is often speculative and generates imagery and philosophical ideas” (133). Turner’s notion of communitas is, thus, helpful in the study of icon painting because although each viewing of an icon in Medieval Rus' was a repetition and assertion of its encoded didacti-cism, this dogma was otherworldly and aimed at divine abstraction.

In two of the most well-known Novgorodian icons of St. Nicholas, Nicholas and St. Nicholas (Figures 1 and 2 respectively), Nicholas is pictured with his traditional large forehead and curly beard with a tuft of hair on the top. With his right hand he offers blessings


through his customary gesture and in his left arm he cradles a bible. The black crosses on his white collar indicate his status as bishop while his facial features, specifically the large forehead, suggest his

intelligence and success in his position. He is surrounded by other saints and by the Virgin Mary. Their presence validates St. Nicholas’ position in the Or-thodox canon and signifies that he is respected by other religious figures. The black crosses on his white collar indicate his status as bishop. In St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker with Scenes from his Life (Figure 3) and The Holy Bishop Nicholas, the Miracle-Worker of Myra (Figures 4), Nicholas is surrounded by images from his life and again by other saints in the periphery. The scenes from his life narrate the completion of his religious journey that led him to heavenly glory and saintly status, thus reinforcing his de-served place in the canon. In Figure 3 he is seen in the Orans position, a pose of prayer that he rarely assumes and that is nor-mally executed by females, most frequently by Mary. This pose emphasizes Nicholas’ role as a sympathetic saint to whom indi-viduals can appeal for help (Ouspensky and Lossky 124). St. Nicholas, in this icon and in all of the above, “is the kind and loving father ready at any mo-ment to come to the rescue of those who call to him” (124). In

Figure 1: Nicholas (Novgorod, middle XIII C)

Figure 2: St. Nicholas (Novgorod, 1294)

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Figure 4, St. Nicholas’ pictorial hagiography is framed by the figures of St. Savva and the holy martyrs, the virgins Paraskeva, Catherine of Alexandria (the patroness of young females students and maidens, just as Nicholas is the patron of young male students and bachelors), and Barbara (often called upon as intercessor to assure the receiving of the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist at the hour of death) (Catholic Encyclopedia). These four Saints, particularly Cath-erine and Barbara who are listed among the fourteen most helpful saints in heaven, are highly ven-erated, and it is a testament to St. Nicholas’ lofty status in the Church canon that he is pictured with them.5

In Figure 4, the four top scenes from St. Nicholas’ life depict his childhood and the leftmost image in that row re-counts his first miracle, when he stood up in his bath all by him-self shortly after his birth. The third scene depicts him as a young child, healing a woman with a diseased arm. Under the scene of his birth is the narration of St. Nicholas helping people overcome their illnesses and ad-versities and his appearance in the Emperor Constantine’s dream, in which he commanded the Emperor to release three generals who were committed to death for crimes they did not commit. On the right side are

Figure 3: St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker with Scenes from his Life (Tver, XIV C)

Figure 4: The Holy Bishop Nicholas, the

Miracle-Worker of Myra (XVIth C)


images of St. Nicholas driving demons out of a well. On the bottom row the artist has depicted St. Nicholas’ death and two posthumous miracles: in the first he rescues John, the father of the Patriarch Meth-odius, from drowning,6 and in the second he returns a captive Arab boy to his parents. The next two images depict Nicholas’ death and either a depiction of his burial or the translation of his relics.7 Present in this visual hagiography are all the parts of the traditional tripartite structure of the Byzantine and Rus'ian written hagiography: remark-able birth, pious life, and postmortem miracles.8 However, this icon is a testament to the fact that narration in icons does not always start with birth and end with death. The scenes from St. Nicholas’ life are arranged so that his life appears to the reader to be a cycle of miracles, with birth and death as merely stages along the way.

Although the use of Augustine in conjunction with Panof-sky’s iconography allows for a more accurate reading than either thinker alone, what is still missing is the hierarchical reading of space present in Smith’s work. For Smith, space is ritualistically and hierar-chically encoded “in order to portray the idealized way that things in the world should be organized” (Bell 12). In Smith’s work, space, specifically the temple, serves as a “focusing lens” to direct the audi-ences’ attention to certain spheres of holiness. Every detail of the icon serves a semiotic function and is meant to focus attention toward one aspect of the saint’s life. Seemingly unimportant signs like “a swarthy complexion, an emaciated figure, a severe facial expression (which appears even in representations of the Infant Jesus, who was depicted as a little adult) represent a necessary attribute of holi-ness” (Uspenskii 13). As Boris Uspenskii notes, other ideographical signs in the image can focus the viewer’s attention to a certain element of encoded didacticism:

… the “extra-personal” (dolichnoe) element[s] in the rep-resentation of a saint, particularly his clothing, that usu-ally consist of signs characterizing not his individuality, but the order (lik) to which he belongs (such as the or-der of the forefathers, the martyrs, the venerable men (prepodobnye), the canonized bishops (sviatiteli), the holy martyrs, etc.), [and] the “personal” (lichnoe) elements, above all the shape of the beard, which is strictly regu-lated for different persons, are individual signs serving to identify a particular saint (emphasis in original). (Uspenskii 13)

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The need for Smith’s theory of hierarchical space be-comes apparent when at-tempting to read the rows of pictorial hagiography surrounding the image of St. Nicholas in St. Nicholas Miracle-Worker with Scenes from His Life and Miracles (Figure 5). The scene visi-ble in Figure 5 is unique in that its hagiography is purely pictorial, unlike Fig-ures 3 and 4 which provide short, written descriptions of the narration. The work in its entirety demonstrates several different painting and compositional styles and, as Kniazeva points out, “the palette is lighter and

creates a cheerful festive background for the narration about the life and miracles of one of the saints best loved by the people” (viii). In the crowd standing behind St. Nicholas’ casket, only the first two rows of faces are distinguishable. The majority of the crowd is repre-sented with disembodied black caps in the background to represent an endless sea of admirers seeing St. Nicholas off to his grave.9 The de-piction of worshipers through icon hillocks, a technique used fre-quently by Rus'ian artists by which multiplicity is achieved with the repetition of a single shape or line, gives the viewer a sense of ex-tended movement around the body. The two clergy members in the front of the coffin, accompanied by a young boy, are also unusually dynamic. Their right legs are stretched forward and their bodies are hunched in a mournful walking pose. The ground under them is shaded in such a way as to give the impression that they are moving at a steady gait along with the procession. Conversely, St. Nicholas is completely framed by his coffin and is the flattest and most immobile part of the scene. He has already left his body and this world, and thus is represented as a static and superior entity. His coffin is drawn with the inverted-perspective typical to medieval Byzantine and

Figure 5: Detail of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker with Scenes from His Life and Miracles


Rus'ian icons. This technique, as described by L. F. Zhegen in Iazyk zhivopisnogo proizvedeniia, depicts perspective not from the vantage point of the outside viewer but from the viewpoint of an internal viewer whose perspective is privileged and who is located at the very heart of the action.

Use of Smith’s conception of “architectural language,” out-lined in To Take Place, illuminates more about this detail than any tra-ditional reading. Smith deciphers maps using architectural language according to the principles of centrality and adjacency, North versus South, sacred and profane hierarchies, and spatial idioms. His method claims that space is hierarchically nuanced according to the rituals that take place there: “with respect to the temple mount, the land is pro-fane; with respect to the temple, the temple mount is profane; with respect to the throne place, the temple is profane” (56). While Iurii Lotman and Uspenskii state that the Russian medieval system was constructed on a marked dualism between sinfulness and the holiness, “a dualism [that] extended also to concepts unconnected with the Church” (4), the semiotics of medieval icons can not be summed up so simply. In a reading of Figure 5, what would be overlooked by Lotman and Uspenskii’s binary is illuminated by using Smith’s con-ceptions of space: with respect to St. Nicholas, everything is profane; with respect to the delineated figures, the crowd is profane; with re-spect to the crowd, the jagged, abstract landscape is profane.

All types of semiotic representation in icons of St. Nicholas depend on the consistency of the artist in order to be effective reli-gious tools. Signs must sufficiently and dependently resemble the things they represent, for icons and their signs are effective only inso-far as they are consistent and readable by the community they are of-fered into. St. Nicholas is always easily identifiable, looking similar from one representation to the next, and this reliability allowed his numerous representations to send a consistent message about his holi-ness to Rus'. Newly Christianized Rus'ians were able to recognize St. Nicholas, and thus each viewing was not only an act of communitas, but also a repetition of St. Nicholas’ encoded didacticism that rein-forced his religious authority over time. Repetition is not recollection, where one sees an image and immediately references the text (as the Seventh Ecumenical Council would have liked), but it is a constant process of creating and of becoming. Every time a viewing of a St. Nicholas icon was followed by the recognition of the image as St. Nicholas, the role of Nicholas in the minds of the viewers and within

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Orthodox doctrine was strengthened. The image of St. Nicholas is similar from icon to icon not

only because icon painters were very familiar with the written vitae, but also because the art of painting icons was highly structured by icon painting manuals. These manuals, called podlinniki, demonstrate the canonicity of icon painting and the fact that icon painting is not a spontaneous ritual, but a very strictly codified one in which the painter works with a limited number of subjects and composition options. The podlinniki, meaning literally “originals,” served as the models and were divided into licevye (facial) and tolkovye (interpretive) sections. The licevye sections comprised sample images while the tolkovye contained verbal descriptions of how a particular saint or subject was to be painted. A Bulgarian podlinnik10 compiled toward the end of the nine-teenth century states that St Nicholas is to be depicted as old with a bald head, a rounded beard, and as saying: “Като пеят победен химн, като величаят, възпяват и говорят: ‘Свят, свят свят’” (Vasiliev 69).11 Another podlinnik, compiled between 1870 and the early 1880s, Er-miniia na Zakharii Petrovich, provides a similar standard for depicting St. Nicholas: “Горната му дреха—кановарова, а долната му—‘коня модра’. Бяла, закръглена брада. Челото му голо. Намръщен” (190).12 Of podlinniki, Uspenskii writes:

Precisely because the ancient icon painter so faithfully followed the podlinnik, a composition established once and for all, and sought to avoid innovations in the treatment of content, any change in the language of artistic devices used by the painter becomes particu-larly obvious. Naturally, he was not always absolutely attentive to this language and frequently, no doubt, was quite unaware of the fact that his language dif-fered somewhere from that of the podlinnik which he was copying. (8)

Just as ancient scribes unintentionally introduced into their copies “features peculiar to the living language of their time” (8), vestiges of personal style are found in many icons, despite icon painters’ assidu-ous adherence to podlinniki. This is visible in Andrei Rublev’s Nicholas the Miracle Worker in which all of the traditional characteristics of St. Nicholas are present, but the image is clearly infused with Rublev’s personal hesychistic ideology. This style is achieved through the use of a lighter color palate and through the detached, otherworldly gaze of St. Nicholas (Figure 6).


The icon painter, as a craftsman of signs and a mediator be-tween the eternal and the community, disappears from his creation in his service to orthodox ideology. He does not leave his fingerprints on his work, as Church doctrine serves as the birthplace of his art; The icon painter’s craft can be considered an act of revealing rather than an act of actual individual creation. In medieval Rus', the painter, who was called a master (dolichnik), revealed (raskryvat') the images on the canvas and used a type of paint that was called the revealer (raskryshka) (Uspenskii 16). “The image, which, as it were, had been there all along, manifests itself and emerges on the surface of the icon; in this way, the icon-painter does not CREATE the image, as it were, but reveals it” (emphasis in original) (16).13 The habit of painting new icons over old ones suggests not only that an already-painted board was holier than a blank one, but that this process of “revealing” oc-curred in many layers; when one revelation became worn and un-readable it was the icon-painter’s job to reveal it again, right over top of the previous image.14 One of the artist’s main tasks was to leave no trace of himself in his work, thus allowing the viewer to see divine manifestation in the image as opposed to the author’s own hand.

The role of the medieval icon painter is not unlike that of the Benjaminian craftsman, who exists most ideally in the form of the storyteller. Walter Benjamin’s storyteller is the individual who people imagine has come from someplace distant and mythical. He is a me-diator between society and the unknown with unhindered access to knowledge that is outside the comprehension of the everyday. The craftsman, in this privileged position, has made a pact with the eternal and it is the promise and idea of eternity that fuels his work. It is his

Figure 6: Detail of Nicholas the Miracle Worker (Andrei Rublev, 1425-1427)

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duty to translate the unintelligible into the intelligible, as he has the ability to “reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that com-prises not only his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own)” in his role as the guardian of the sacred, of truth, wisdom and of fairy-tales and legends (Benjamin 108). Without his story he has already been transformed into something different; His very being as a story-teller is dependent upon the fact that he is constantly engaged in a continual, circular movement from society, to the eternal, and then back again. The medieval icon-painter and the Benjaminian craftsman have in common not only their statuses as mediums between the earthly and heavenly realms: both work to reveal the latter in a way intelligible to the former. Both the icon painter and the Benjaminiam craftsman are just that—craftsmen—because they are public artists, rooted deeply in the notions of epic truth and wisdom. The differ-ence between these two arts, however, is substantial. Although the storyteller structures the actions of others into a narrative, it is pre-cisely this act of structuring that Benjamin considers to be the true craftsmanship of storytelling. The fingerprints of the storyteller are always visible on his creation, where as the icon painter disappears behind his work in service to divine ideology. Similarly, while the craft of storytelling depends on the audience’s willingness to listen and on the active choice of the audience to interpret, both of which are necessary in order to facilitate the repetition of the story by word of mouth, the icon pushes the viewer toward a specific, encoded truth: this truth also demands interpretation, but the boundaries of that in-terpretation are defined by the Church.

Just as icon painters acted as storytellers to the Church, medi-ating between religious artifacts and divine inspiration, medieval icons were mediators between the temporality of man and the unintelligibil-ity of God. Icons acted as “objects in time” to which the surrounding community of Orthodox Rus'ians could relate, and which they could use in their attempts to grasp the “Truth” of their religion: that which is eternally “out of time.” This Truth, proscribed by Orthodox doc-trine and embedded in pictorial hagiographies by Church artists, is best decoded by understanding that each spatial unit of the icon points to a particular idea, as Uspenskii and Augustine note, but that these ideas are arranged hierarchically, as detailed in Smith’s work. The icons celebrating the life and achievements of St. Nicholas dem-onstrate the way in which each sign of the medieval icon served a spe-


cific function. The role of the icon in the community also suggests that the ancient viewer had these functions in mind and was affected by them while admiring its decoration during rituals. St. Nicholas’ icons constitute a family in which each image contains its own internal narrative, while simultaneously contributing to a larger narrative of St. Nicholas’ role in the Orthodox canon. They are part of the Church’s narrative insofar as they participate in what it is to be an icon of St. Nicholas, namely, that as a system of signs they represent with a cer-tain amount of consistency both the personal and extra-personal qualities of St. Nicholas. An icon of St. Nicholas that did not accu-rately depict his status as a bishop through the markings on his collar, that did not reflect his large head and creased brow, and that did not replicate the other features standard to his written and pictorial depic-tion was not recognizable as an icon of St. Nicholas and could not serve its function within the community. The medieval icon, as a di-dactic tool of Russian Orthodoxy, required the participation of the community, of icon-painters, and of the Church in order to ritualisti-cally communicate Orthodoxy’s message through the transcendent lives and extraordinary miracles of the saints.

Notes 1. I use the term pictorial hagiography to describe those icons that depict

not only a saint, but a narration of his life: this is most commonly achieved through the illustration of particular scenes from a saint’s life around the borders of an icon. Hagiographical narration, however, is conveyed not only in these scenes but in almost every spatial unit of an icon, especially in the personal and extra-personal elements of a saint that are encoded by the artist.

2. Although icons were fashioned for an uneducated audience and declared

to serve a specific didactic function, reading medieval religious images necessitates a special knowledge in order to decode the narrative threads arranged by the artist. In this paper I deal only with intended influence and a topic for another study would be an analysis of whether icons suc-cessfully exerted their anticipated influence upon the community or whether many of the signs weaved into the image were lost on the audi-ence during religious rituals.

3. V. N. Shliapkin argues in Russkaia paleografiia that deteriorated icons and Holy books could also be burned, although Uspenskii is skeptical of this viewpoint because of the sensitivity of the church to the burning of icons. Uspenskii cites an example of the burning of an icon of Avva-

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kum in which the images of Christ and the angels were scraped off, deemed too holy to be burned, prior to the burning (69).

4. These efforts are catalogued in Woodruff. A typical entry reads: (this

one is about a fourth-century sarcophagus scene): “Front, zone 1: Christ: Miracle of raising Lazarus—Mary or Martha of Bethany, veiled, kneeling before gabled tomb enclosing standing mummy struck with rod held by Christ, holding roll” (140).

5. St. Nicholas is not only pictured as surrounded by other Saints, but also appears in several collective icons. In Ss. Elijah, Nicholas and Anastasia (Novgorod, end of the XIV C.), Ss. Florius, Nicholas, Blasius and Anastasia (Novgorod, end of XIV C.), and Ss. Nicholas, Blasius, Florius, Laurus, The Prophet Elijah and Paraskeva Pyatnitsa (first half of XVth C.), he is pictured not only in his own narration, but interacting with others. In these im-ages he is at once both a member of a saintly collective and an independ-ent, recognizable figure, always holding his right hand in the traditional gesture while clutching a book with his left. These collective icons are sometimes arranged according to menologies and bring together, in one or several rows, saints and festivals of the liturgical month. Often, how-ever, the pairing of saints with festivals makes no logical sense when compared to the menologies. Ouspensky and Lossky propose that, in these cases, “the choice of festivals and of saints was probably dictated by other motives, according to the wish of whoever ordered the icon” (145). For instance, family icons may have commemorated feasts and saints according to individual preferences and devotions.

6. This drowning man is also often depicted as Demetrius and may be ei-ther a different representation of the same miracle or an entirely differ-ent miracle (Ouspensky and Lossky 124).

7. Ouspensky and Lossky point out in their reading of this icon that the inscription over this scene is so badly defaced that an exact translation is impossible (124).

8. See Loparev. 9. This same technique is common in Egyptian art: crowds are depicted by

the repetition of a single body part or an article of clothing. 10. I am preserving the original spelling and punctuation in all citations from

the podlinniki. 11. “When they sing an anthem of victory, when they extol, sing praises, and

say: “Holy, holy, holy.” 12. “His outer garment —cinnabar, the one underneath—dark blue. White,

rounded beard. Bare forehead. [He is] Scowling.” 13. Uspenskii analogizes the icon painter not to the craftsmen but to the

priest, due to the painters’ use of podlinniki, or icon-painting manuals: “similar to the way in which the priest constitutes the Lord’s Body ‘through the Divine Word,’” the icon-painter gives life to the body with paint in place of the word (10).


14. If the surface was unusable, the icon was disposed of.

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