The Icon and the Axe

from a growing tendency to translate hymns of the church into visual form. The interdependence of sight, sound and smell had long been important in the liturgy of the Eastern Church; and beginning in the twelfth century, there was an increasing tendency to use sacred art as a direct illustration of the sung liturgy and seasonal hymns of the church.64 Already in the fourteenth-century Russian north, new church murals were becoming, in effect, musical illustrations.65 The Russian Christmas icon-"The Assembly of the Pre-sanctified Mother of God," illustrating all creation coming in adoration before the Virgin-is a direct transposition of the Christmas hymn. Increasingly popular in Russia also were icons of the Virgin surrounded by a variety of scenes taken from the set of twenty-four Lenten hymns of praise known as akathistoi.ss Individual icons were also drawn from this series, such as the "Virgin of the Indestructible Wall," which perpetuated in almost every Russian city and monastery the Byzantine image of the Virgin strengthening the battlements of Constantinople against infidel assault. So great was the preoccupation with battle that semi-legendary warriors and contemporary battle scenes soon became incorporated into these holy pictures, making them an important source for the history of weaponry as well as piety.67

Hardly less dramatic than the broadening of subject matter and refinement of technique was the development of the iconostasis, or icon screen, Russia's most distinctive contribution to the use of icons. In Byzantium and Kiev, illustrated cloths and icons had often been placed on the central or "royal" doors that connected the sanctuary with the nave of the church and on the screen separating the two. Holy pictures had been painted and carved on the beam above the screen.68 But it is only in Muscovy that one finds the systematic introduction of a continuous screen of icons extending high above the sanctuary screen, representing a kind of pictorial encyclopedia of Christian belief. From at least the end of the fourteenth century, when Rublev and two others designed the beautiful three-tiered iconostasis for the Archangel Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin-the earliest surviving iconostasis-these illustrated screens began to be a regular feature of Russian churches. Beyond the many icons at eye level on the sanctuary screen were added up to six higher rows of icons, often reaching up to the ceilings of new churches.69

The Russian icon screen represented a further extension of the process of humanizing Orthodoxy-offering a multitude of pictorial links between the remote God of the East and the simple hopes of an awakening people. Placed between the sanctuary and the congregation, the icon screen lay "on the boundary between heaven and earth,"70 and depicted the variety of human forms through which God had come from out of His holy place to

redeem His people. Each icon provided an "external expression of the transfigured state of man,"71 a window through which the believing eye could peer into the beyond. The icon screen as a whole provided a pictorial guide to the sanctification which only the church could give.

The tapers that were lit by the faithful to burn in large candelabras before the icon screen throughout and beyond each service transformed the otherwise dark and cold church into a "candlelight kingdom."72 These flickering flames reminded the congregation of the forms which God the Father had mysteriously assumed within the "life-giving Trinity": the Son, who appeared to his apostles as pure light at the Transfiguration prior to His death; and the Holy Spirit, which came to them as pure flame at Pentecost after his final ascension.78