Icons in Baltimore

The fragrance of incense, the throb of Russian choir music, a dazzle of peacock blues, flaming reds and gold filled the Baltimore Museum. It was also filled with socialite art tasters and leather-jacketed shipyard workers who had come to see "The Golden Age of the Russian Icon"--sacred pictures from the ancient towns of Holy Russia (Kiev, Novgorod, Moscow) in the religious setting that alone gives them meaning.

Against a tremendous improvised iconostasis (a screen built to hold icons when cathedral walls were full), visitors saw the tall spare figures of saints and Virgins, mournful of mien, with inclining haloed heads and slim-fingered hands. These paintings represented the oldest and most continuous art tradition of Europe--a tradition whose source was Byzantium ("icon" is from the Greek eikon, "image"). Icon painters of the 11th to 17th Centuries, "humble and mild and pious" (as a 16th Century Church Council enjoined them to be), painted as reverently as they prayed, "remembering the work of the earlier painters, following the best models." Only in the last dozen years have Westerners appreciated the splendor of Holy Russia's painting. It was the Soviet Government, despoiler of churches, which fostered that appreciation--and last week's show was thus indirectly, though in no sense officially, indebted to the U.S.S.R.

Before the Revolution, icons were still gathering soot in dim church recesses. Many were repainted six or seven times, defaced with plaster, chalk and glue relief. Their artistic worth escaped even most Russians. The few attempts made at restoration were restricted to dubbing in missing hands and faces. One of the Soviet Government's first acts was to set up the National Central Restoration Workshops, which are still busy cleaning off the accumulation of centuries. Occasionally a bearded prophet, scraped off, becomes a sweet-faced Virgin.

Except to neutralize white scars, the Soviet workshops will not retouch. What time has destroyed is gone.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.