Journal of Icon Studies, Volume 4
Welcome to Volume 4 of the Icon Museum and Study Center’s Journal of Icon Studies. The Journal is an open-access, peer-reviewed resource for the interdisciplinary study of icons around the globe, from the Byzantine period to the present.
Click image above to view the entire Vol. 4 as a PDF.
Introduction
Wendy Salmond and Justin Willson
The following papers stem from the virtual international conference Collecting Orthodox Art in the West: A History and Look Towards the Future held at the Icon Museum and Study Center in June 2021. The conference examined the motivation and means of icon collecting, and inquired into systems of classification and customs of display in North America and Europe. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the globalization of the world’s economy, and the digital revolution of the last few decades, the focus, reach, and habits of collectors have been radically transformed, but exactly how the situation today compares with that of past generations of collectors of Orthodox art has only begun to be explored. A conference addressing major collectors of icons in the last few centuries therefore seemed timely.
Novgorod School, Tabletka: Four Men in a Fiery Furnace, 15th c. (Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art, 1979.001).
From Forges to Fiery Furnaces: Amy Putnam, Russian Icon Collector
Derrick R. Cartwright
The Timken Museum of Art is renowned for its collection of European and American paintings. The museum also possesses a group of Russian icons dating from the 15th to 19th centuries. While numerous, these icons are somewhat less well celebrated. The devotional images have been shown in a dedicated space since the museum first opened in 1965. The icons represent the personal collecting passion of one of the museum’s founders: Amy Putnam. With her two sisters, Anne and Irene, Putnam relocated to San Diego, California, in 1913 from the family home in Bennington, Vermont. She later studied Russian language and literature at Stanford University. After becoming enamored of Russian culture, and after inheriting the family fortune, in 1938 Putnam’s personal collecting interests expanded beyond the “Old Masters” that she frequently donated to museums. At the time of her death, Putnam owned more than 300 Russian icons. These were kept in her private rooms within the mansion that she and her older sister, Anne, shared at Fourth and Walnut Streets in San Diego’s prosperous Banker’s Hill neighborhood. This paper speculates about the goals behind Putnam’s drive to surround herself with these remarkable works.
The Long Journey of the Jumati Medallions
Mariam Otkhmezuri Charlton
Nine medallions in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, known as the “Jumati medallions,” once decorated a silver icon frame of the archangel Gabriel in the Georgian monastery of Jumati. Dated to around 1100 the busts depicting various saints are finely worked cloisonné enamels, composed on a gold ground, and are considered to exemplify the highest echelon of Byzantine craftsmanship. This paper examines the Jumati medallions from the standpoint of provenance, retracing their journey to their present location. The investigation tells a complicated story in which colonial practices of acquisition are intermingled with the formation of private collections and the development of Byzantine Studies.
Richard Hare’s Russian Icon Collection and the Persistent Lure of Byzantium in Anglo-Soviet Artistic Relations
Louise Hardiman
This article concentrates on the activities of Richard Hare, whose interest in icons sheds new light on the history of British and western collecting of and scholarship on Russian art in the twentieth century. For British audiences, as elsewhere in the west, Russian icons, their historical origins, and cultural significance were little understood beyond specialist circles. But, for a few decades in the mid twentieth century, they gained new visibility in the British art world. Despite this, probably for political reasons, state-owned museums did not extend their holdings and the gap was filled by a private collector: Hare, this article argues, was the first British collector of icons in significant numbers. He is a valuable case study of a western collector of Russian art, but his particular attention to icons illustrates an important leitmotif in the under-researched picture of Anglo-Soviet artistic relations, namely, the persistence of Byzantinism in British responses to Russian art.
Collecting Orthodoxy in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Rome: From the Collection of Agostino Mariotti (1724-1806) to the Vatican Museum (1820-Present)
Ginevra Odone
During the 18th century, the abbot and lawyer Agostino Mariotti (1724-1806) formed an extensive art collection in Rome. Of the 198 paintings that made up the Mariotti collection, 35 were works of what was then understood as the Byzantine style. Mariotti, an important scholar of ancient Greek, collected these panels with a dual purpose: as testimonies of rites of the Orthodox Church in juxtaposition to those of the Western Church, and as reflecting the influence that the school of “Greek” art exerted on Latin schools throughout the Middle Ages. After the death of Mariotti (1806), many of these objects, including Byzantine icons, were purchased in 1820 by the Vatican Museums, where they are still preserved today.
Authenticity and Dissimulation in Joseph Davies Icon Collection
Justin Willson
The Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, houses a unique set of Russian feast icons. This study proposes that the Chazen feast icons offer a glimpse into a wider phenomenon of collecting, namely, the desire to create patterns and unity amidst disorder and difference. This set includes authentic Muscovite-era painting but also dissimulations common to Old Believer restorers and workshops dependent on pattern books. Old Believers, who rejected Westernizing trends in icon painting, promoted the publication of pattern books, and they came to play an important role in twentieth-century icon painting. The author suggests that we should embrace the heterogeneity of such groups. Often scholars are trained to see similarity, which allows them to generalize about stylistic and iconographic developments and the function of images in a world distant from the present. However, the search for similarity and coherence runs aground on such a highly synthetic group as the Chazen feast icons. Studying the differences between the individual panels allows one to see how a composite whole may have come into existence with restoration campaigns or for the art market, catering to the desire to see unity amidst multiplicity.