The Face of Ivan the Terrible & Portraiture in Russia.
Nobody really knows what Ivan the Terrible looked like. The 17th century so-called “portrait” of Ivan (above) cannot be confidently asserted as a real likeness of the Russian ruler. The melancholic features, high forehead and receding hairline may correspond to written descriptions of the Tsar, but it could equally be the face of a saint. Moreover there wasn’t really a tradition of portraiture from which this striking image could emerge: portraiture as a genre did not appear in Russia until the early 17th century. In 1677, this image entered the Danish collections through the intermediary of an ambassador to Tsar Feodor II, and was described in 1737 as follows: "the head of an old man painted in the Muscovite style." If the inscription is not a later addition, at most the "portrait" can only be a retrospective image of the sovereign. This deliberately archaistic portrait is comparable to the funerary icon of Vasily III, father of Ivan IV the Terrible. Though 18th century images of the Tsar and nineteenth-century “portraits” like that of Victor Vanetsov’s disturbing psychological full-length version strove to capture something of the devout and savage sides of Ivan’s personality it seems unlikely that these are reliable representations of his actual face.[1] The fascination with Ivan’s character extended into the twentieth-century with a proposal to Stalin to exhume Ivan’s body and reconstruct his features from his skull. Stalin initially agreed, but changed his mind. This is strange because Stalin admired- and identified himself with- Ivan the Terrible, so much so that he commissioned a film of Tsar which was made by Sergei Eisenstein and released in two parts 1944 and 1958. It was left to Khrushchev in 1953 to authorise the exhumation of Ivan’s remains in order to attempt a forensic facial reconstruction made by Mikhail Gerasimov. Apart from his face, the violent life and times of Ivan IV proved irresistible to droves of history painters of the 19th century who showed such tragedies as the Tsar killing his son in a fit of rage as in Repin’s painting in the Tretyakov Gallery.
[1] In the 2007 film Elizabeth the Golden Age, the Vanetsov portrait appears as an anachronistic work of Ivan’s own era.
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