Development of the Pictorial Cycles of the Tale of the Mother of God of Tikhvin in the late Middle Ages
Keywords:
icon, icon painters, Old Russian painting, the Mother of God of Tikhvin, Legend about the icon, pictorial cycles, Tikhvin, Moscow, Novgorod, 16th century, monasteries, artistic style, iconographyAbstract
The history of the creation of the cycles of miracles from the Theotokos of Tikhvin icon, based on early editions of the Legend, is connected with the special veneration of the icon by Vasily III, who prayed before it for an heir to the throne. Apparently, such monuments first appeared in the Annunciation Church in Moscow and the Assumption Church in Tikhvin after the Grand Prince’s pilgrimage to this site in 1526, depicted alongside with Archbishop Makarius in a scene of prayer. They were clearly painted by a Novgorod master based on a recently created text. During the restoration work after the Kremlin fire in 1547, Novgorodians painted a new frame for the existing copy that had survived at that time, copying it from the icon in Tikhvin. Since Ivan IV had made a pilgrimage to the shrine a previous year, his image was also included in the scene of prayer. By 1678, the old icon of the Tikhvin monastery became dilapidated and no longer corresponded to the ‘local’ tier of the cathedral iconostasis. For this reason it was replaced by Rodion Sergeyev with a new one, which repeated the dimensions of the other images of this ensemble. It retained Novgorod iconography and partly the style of the era of Archbishop Makarius. However, the fields were supplemented with new scenes from the Book of Miracles of the Hodegetria Icon, compiled in the monastery in 1658, the author and illustrator of which was Rodion Sergeyev himself. The prototype underlying these monuments explains the unusual compositional features of their design.
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