Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity ed. by Jefferson J. A. Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield (review)

Icons can have profound political and social implications, and while the focus of the eleven chapters in this book is on the icon in modernity, there is enough material outlining the icon’s journey from medieval to the early modern to be of interest to any scholar of historical trends over the past millennium. Icons have been a significant and enduring feature of European religion and art, and have played a significant role in communal resistance to the decline of the medieval worldview of ‘magic and mysticism’ (p. 2). The lessons learnt from analysis of the changing role of specifically Russian icons under modernity also apply to much earlier periods. Indeed, the significance of the Russian icon as a paradigm for all Russian medieval and early modern art makes this essential reading for any art historian.

Different chapters analyse icons and their theology and philosophy of the body, their role in political change, issues of communal identity and political power, and even cinema and icons in the USA. Possibly of most interest to the medieval scholar is Elena Boeck’s excellent analysis of the compilation icon – a large tableaux-style panel consisting of multiple images of the Virgin Mary. Boeck traces this from the twelfth-century catalogues through to fifteenth-century Western European Wunderkammern imagery, and then to seventeenth-century Russian examples. The uniqueness of this iconographic style is in the plurality of images portrayed, and Boeck argues that this style itself ‘became a bearer of meaning’ (p. 32). She also discusses the reception of Western-style imagery, the resurgence of nationalism, and the impact on art preferences in pre-revolutionary Russia. This is fascinating history that raises many questions and is relevant to similar West European research on icons, Protestantism, and nationalism.

Vera Shevzov’s chapter on the icon’s central place in defining right belief traverses a thousand years of history before settling on twentieth-century Russia. She makes some excellent points about the historic use of icons as a symbol of the Church’s triumph over other religions and especially over a pluralist worldview. She notes that the icon’s revelatory role stands against ‘modernity’s anthropological axioms’ (p. 59). Hence the Triumph of Orthodoxy both sustains and is maintained by the living tradition of iconography. Her example of the Russian Church’s use of the anathemas against iconoclasts in the 1870s is an excellent case study of understanding how communal identity is shaped by the theology of icons.

As many other reviewers have noted, this book is ground-breaking for its analysis of the traditional as well as innovative role of icons during a period where they were in danger of being eclipsed by the state apparatus. Icons were preserved both in Soviet museums and by ‘Old Believers’ for surprisingly similar reasons of nationalism and maintaining of a past. Overall this is a well-written book with a specialist focus and is most suited to an early modern art historian. All chapters have extensive endnotes and many use illustrations to good effect. After reading this work icons will never look the same.