Byzantine Culture

History · Article

The Vladimir Mother of God

Painted in Constantinople around 1130 and taken to Russia, the Vladimir icon is the finest Eleousa in existence. Its journey, its political uses, its overpaintings and its 1918 cleaning.

A panel about a metre high, painted in Constantinople around 1130, shows the Virgin holding the Christ child against her cheek. It was sent as a gift to Kiev, moved to Vladimir, moved again to Moscow, credited with saving Russia from three invasions, carried at coronations, overpainted at least four times, cleaned in 1918, nationalised, exhibited in the Tretyakov Gallery, and is now in a church attached to that gallery where it is both a museum object and an object of worship.

It is the most important icon in Russia and the finest surviving example of Byzantine painting of the Komnenian period. Almost nothing of it is original.

What Survives

This needs stating first, because the icon’s fame rests on a face that is a small fraction of the panel.

The original twelfth-century paint survives in the faces of the Virgin and Child, parts of the Virgin’s hand, and small areas elsewhere. Everything else — the background, the robes, the Child’s body, the Virgin’s other hand — is repainting from the fifteenth, sixteenth or nineteenth centuries.

The panel was repainted at least four times, each time the darkened varnish making the image illegible. This was normal practice, described in how Byzantine icons were made: an icon was a living object, maintained and renewed, not a historical artefact.

What the 1918 cleaning revealed was that beneath layers of later Russian work lay a Constantinopolitan painting of the very highest quality — and the discovery transformed the study of both Byzantine and Russian art.

The Painting

The type is the Eleousa, the tender Virgin: mother and child press cheek to cheek, the Child’s arm reaching around her neck.

What distinguishes this panel is the Virgin’s expression. Her eyes are turned away from the child and outward, not meeting the viewer’s gaze but not avoiding it either, and they carry a grief that has nothing to do with the moment depicted. The reading, standard since the icon was cleaned, is that she sees the Passion in the embrace. Whether or not the painter intended that specific idea, the face achieves an emotional register that is rare in any medieval art.

Technically it belongs to the Komnenian manner described in Byzantine iconography: a dark olive underpaint with fine, closely graded warm tones built over it and white highlights drawn on last, producing a face modelled in light rather than in shadow.

A detail worth knowing: the Child’s feet, in the original composition, are shown with one sole turned outward toward the viewer. This is a specific iconographic signature, and copies of the Vladimir icon reproduce it.

The Journey

c. 1130. Painted in Constantinople, probably for the imperial court, and sent to Grand Prince Yuri Dolgoruky of Kiev — a diplomatic gift of exactly the kind described in Byzantine legacy in Russia. It was installed in a convent at Vyshgorod near Kiev.

1155. Yuri’s son Andrei Bogolyubsky took it north to Vladimir, which he was building into a new capital, and housed it in the Dormition Cathedral there. The chronicle says the horses carrying it stopped and would not move at a certain spot, which was taken as the Virgin’s choice of destination.

1395. Brought to Moscow as Timur’s army advanced on the city. Timur turned back. The deliverance was credited to the icon, and a monastery — the Sretensky, “the meeting” — was founded at the spot where the Muscovites met it on the road.

1480 and 1521. Credited with two further deliverances, from the Great Horde at the Ugra river and from a Crimean Tatar raid.

It stayed in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin from 1480, and tsars were crowned and metropolitans elected before it. Its political function in the ideology described in the Third Rome was considerable: an icon from Constantinople, resident in Moscow, protecting the Russian state, made a visible argument about where the Byzantine inheritance had gone.

1918

The icon was removed from the Kremlin after the revolution and cleaned in 1918 by a restoration commission, using the methods developed in Russia over the preceding decade for removing darkened olifa varnish and later overpaint.

This period — roughly 1904 to 1925 — is when early Russian and Byzantine icon painting was rediscovered as art. The cleaning of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev in 1904 and of the Vladimir icon in 1918 showed that beneath centuries of accumulated black varnish and repainting lay images of a brilliance nobody had suspected. The consequences for art history, and for modern painting — several of the Russian avant-garde looked hard at newly cleaned icons — were substantial.

The icon went to the State Historical Museum and then, in 1930, to the Tretyakov Gallery.

Where It Is Now

Since 1999 it has been kept in the Church of St Nicholas in Tolmachi, a church within the Tretyakov Gallery complex in Moscow that functions simultaneously as a consecrated church and a museum gallery. The icon is in a climate-controlled case; services are held in the church.

The arrangement is a compromise between two incompatible claims — that the icon is a national art treasure requiring museum conditions, and that it is a holy object belonging in a church — and it has been contested repeatedly, with periodic requests for its transfer to the Kremlin cathedrals or to the patriarchate. It has occasionally been lent for services outside the gallery, each time over conservation objections.

Copies

The Vladimir icon was copied more than almost any other image in Russia, and the copies were themselves treated as miraculous. Several — the Vladimir-Volokolamsk, the icons made for the Dormition Cathedral when the original travelled — are significant works in their own right.

This is characteristic of Orthodox practice and follows from the theology of the icon: the honour paid to an image passes to its prototype, so a faithful copy of a holy icon participates in the same relationship. A copy is not a reproduction in the modern sense; it is another instance.

Why It Matters

For Byzantine art, the Vladimir icon is the best surviving twelfth-century panel from Constantinople — better preserved in its faces than anything that stayed in the empire, and the standard against which Komnenian painting is measured.

For Russian art, it is the founding object: the imported masterpiece against which local painting defined itself, copied and adapted for four hundred years, and the ancestor of the tradition that produced Rublev.

For anyone interested in how objects acquire meaning, it is a case study. A diplomatic gift became a dynastic palladium, then a national protector, then a contested national treasure — and the face that carries all of it was painted by an anonymous Greek in a workshop on the Bosphorus for reasons nobody recorded.

The 1918 Cleaning in Detail

The restoration that revealed the icon was a technical operation with a specific method, and the method is what made the Russian rediscovery of icon painting possible at all.

The problem was olifa, the boiled linseed oil varnish. It saturates the colours when fresh and darkens progressively, reaching near-opacity in roughly a century. Traditional practice was to repaint over the darkened surface rather than remove it, so an old icon accumulated alternating layers of varnish and new painting.

The technique developed in Russia in the decade before the revolution involved softening the varnish and overpaint with solvents applied under close control, working in small areas, and stopping at the layer judged original — which required judging, correctly, where that was.

The Vladimir icon was cleaned in 1918 by a commission under Grigory Chirikov. What emerged was that the faces of the Virgin and Child, and part of one hand, were twelfth-century Constantinopolitan work of the highest quality, and that everything else was later Russian repainting from at least four campaigns — the earliest documented in 1195, then 1408 (associated with Andrei Rublev), the sixteenth century and the nineteenth.

What Later Repainting Tells Us

The layers that were removed were not worthless, and modern scholarship has taken more interest in them than the 1918 restorers did.

Each repainting records how a generation understood the image: what it thought the faces should look like, what colours belonged, how the drapery should fall. The 1408 campaign associated with Rublev’s circle is a significant moment in Russian painting in its own right, and it was removed to expose the Greek original.

This is the ethical problem in icon conservation stated as sharply as it can be. The 1918 commission made a choice — that the twelfth-century Byzantine layer was the real icon and the seven centuries of Russian devotion on top of it were obscuring it — and that choice was not obviously correct. It reflected a particular moment in Russian cultural politics, when establishing a Byzantine pedigree for Russian art was of considerable interest.

The layers were recorded before removal, which is why anything is known about them. Modern practice would be more cautious, and several famous icons have been left uncleaned for exactly this reason.

The Evacuations

The icon’s twentieth-century travels are documented and illustrate how it has continued to function as a national object.

It was removed from the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral after the revolution, cleaned, and placed in the State Historical Museum, then transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery in 1930.

During the Second World War it was evacuated with the Tretyakov’s collection to Novosibirsk, and returned in 1944. A persistent story that it was flown around Moscow in an aircraft in 1941 to protect the city has no documentary support and belongs to the same family of legends as the icon’s earlier deliverances.

Since 1999 it has been in the Church of St Nicholas in Tolmachi, a consecrated church within the Tretyakov complex, in a climate-controlled case. It has occasionally been moved for services elsewhere, each time over the objections of conservators, and the tension between its status as a museum object and as a holy object has not been resolved and probably cannot be.

Looking at It

For anyone examining a reproduction, three details repay attention.

The eyes. The Virgin’s are turned outward and slightly away, not meeting the viewer and not looking at the child. This is unusual in the Eleousa type and is the source of most of the panel’s effect.

The mouth. Small, closed, with the corners very slightly down — the whole expression of grief is carried by perhaps two millimetres of drawing.

The Child’s foot. The sole turned outward toward the viewer is a specific iconographic signature, and Russian copies of the Vladimir icon reproduce it faithfully. It is how a copy declares its prototype.

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