Art in Kiev
In order to understand Russian art it is also necessary to know something of the history of the Church in Russia because the evolution of early Russian painting is inseparable from religious matters. According to one tradition, Christianity was brought to Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine by St Andrew, a disciple of Christ. St Andrew is said to have travelled to Kiev where he uttered a prophecy that a great city would be erected there on the banks of the river Dnieper. However, the first Rus to embrace Christianity was Princess Olga of Kiev, though her grandson Vladimir the Great (958-1015) turned Kiev into a centre of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Initially a pagan chief, Vladimir was offered both invitations to convert to the Muslim and Jewish faiths but rejected both, the former on the grounds that Russians could not live without alcohol; instead, he joined the Christian faith in A.D. 988 by baptising himself and members of his family in a distant town. On returning to Kiev, Vladimir ordered its residents to bathe in the river Dnieper, indicating that those who did not would incur his displeasure; he then destroyed the statues of the pagan gods severing links with paganism completely. Cementing links with Christianity, Vladimir married Anne, the sister of Basil and Constantine, the joint Emperors of Byzantine. Vladimir’s wholesale conversion of his people signalled that Russian was now officially a Christian state, and with the country choosing to join the Christian faith the implications for art and architecture were profound. Inspired by his experience at the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Vladimir erected his first church in Kiev in 939 A.D. which would last until 1240 when it was destroyed by the Mongols who invaded Russia, installed the “Golden Horde” and forced the natives to pay tributes. Eventually with the appearance of Ivan the Great the Russians would refuse to pay tributes to the Mongols. The Mongol tribes were further weakened by further internecine fighting, with a new Mongol warlord, Tamerlane, conquering much of the original Mongol Empire in Russia in 1395. After Tamerlane’s death, his empire was broken into four independent khanates: Astrakhan, Kazan, Crimea, and Sibir. Thinking much like his father, Vladimir’s son, Yaroslav, built the Church of Holy Wisdom in Kiev to rival Constantinople and this church was immediately constituted the Metropolitan Church of Russia. Its art provides some of the most important examples of what is called Kievan art (above) which appeared in Rus at the time which is worth remembering first appeared in Russia at a time when in Europe the northern Romanesque style was entering its final phase, early Gothic was establishing itself on the Ile de France, and the first stirrings of the renaissance could be felt in Italy. Kiev became known as “the Byzantine of Asia” and its art was Byzantine influenced, though marked by less formality in the figures; it also showed more humanity in the faces. In the words of Auty and Obolensky: “High Byzantine monumentality and serenity remain[ed] [in Kievan art], invigorated by new flexibility and variegation.”[1] Kiev burned bright as an artistic city though it would be eclipsed by the city of Vladimir which was adopted as the seat of government until it too slid into historical oblivion. The epoch of Kievan Rus lasted from 882 to 1240 when the invasion of the Mongols effectively ended this first phase of Byzanto-Russo art.
[1] Robert Auty, Dimitri Obolensky (eds), An Introduction to Russian Art and Architecture, (CUP, 1980), 16.
Comments