Click the image above to view the entire Vol. 2 as a pdf.
Editor’s Greeting
Wendy Salmond
Welcome to the second issue of the Journal of Icon Studies (JIS), an annual publication of The Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, MA.
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, The Venetian Woman (Saint Mary Magdalene), ca. 1527–40, oil on canvas, 94.2 x 75.3 cm. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, cat. 307 (photo © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Jörg P. Anders)
Savoldo’s Magdalene: “True Reformations Are Internal”
Michael Calder, Independent Scholar, England
Unorthodox Orthodoxy? The Icon’s Role in the Reception of Russian Orthodoxy by the Volga-Kama Chuvash
Alison Ruth Kolosova, University of Tartu, Estonia
This article discusses the icon’s role as a visual, sensory, and material means of encounter with the sacred realm in the context of Russian Orthodox missions in the Volga-Kama region of Russia. It argues that the icon facilitated engagement with Russian Orthodox worldview and rites before the introduction of vernacular textual learning owing to its capacity to resonate with indigenous understandings of the sacred and divine. The article draws on prerevolutionary ethnographic texts describing the role played by icons in Chuvash religious rites and argues that, rather than the dvoeverie and paganism attributed to them by the missionaries, the Chuvash were by the early twentieth century practicing an indigenous, inculturated Orthodoxy.
Leonid Chupiatov’s Icon of the Protecting Veil
Leslie O’Bell, University of Texas at Austin
The present essay is the first article devoted to the religious paintings of the Soviet artist Leonid Chupiatov (1890–1941), with special attention to his Veil of the Mother of God over the Dying City, created during the desolate Leningrad siege-winter of 1941-42. Dmitry Likhachev memorably called this work the “soul of the siege.” The article analyzes what it offers the viewer directly, as a modern version of the traditional image. It goes on to place the painting in the context of Chupiatov’s religious production, both during the siege and previous to it, and to explore the circumstances which ensured its preservation against all odds. An apocalyptic context which challenges even divine compassion and saving grace, one which recapitulates the forty days of Christ in the desert—such is the immediate context of Chupiatov’s icon of the Protecting Veil in his artistic work from the winter of 1941–42. In the end, the survival of this powerful image becomes comprehensible through the connections of a fragmented religious-philosophical confraternity. The article thus represents a step towards finally acknowledging the presence of the religious image in the artistic response to the Leningrad siege.
The Hospitality of Abraham in the Work of Julia Stankova, Painter of Bulgarian Icons
François Boespflug, l’Université de Strasbourg; Jordan Daniel Wood (translator)
This article seeks to make the work of the Bulgarian icon painter Julia Stankova better known to readers. It does so first by presenting her person, her trajectory, and her iconographical work. Then it offers an overview of her reflection on the relationships between the Bible and the icon. Finally, it analyzes a dozen icons that she has produced over the past twenty years on the theme of the Hospitality of Abraham as recounted in Genesis.
Book Reviews
Nebesnaia golubizna angel’skikh odezhd
by Elena A. Osokina
Waltraud M. Bayer, Senior Research Fellow, FWF Austrian Science Fund, Vienna
