Like the ancient churches of the western tradition, the Eastern Orthodox churches considered the Temptation of Eve to have led to the Fall of humanity. In contrast, they considered Mary the figure of perfect humanity. The Russian Orthodox Church revered Mary’s faith, piety, and obedience. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary said: “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; May it be done to me according to your Word” (Luke 1:38). Thus, Mary’s voluntary acceptance of God’s will when Archangel Gabriel asked her to bear Jesus was the model for humanity.
Together Eve and Mary were prototypes of redemption because Mary’s obedience to God’s will reversed Eve’s disobedience. The Russian Orthodox Church understood Mary as the “New Eve.” This typological connection runs through the entire Russian Orthodox Akathist prayer cycle and it is evident in the symbolism in Russian icons of Eve and Mary. Icons were thought of as portals between the invisible, heavenly world, and the visible, earthly world, and so their symbolism was believed to reveal truths about the invisible and ideal world. This means that we can move beyond the textual sources to examine the roles of Eve and Mary in Orthodoxy from the perspective of iconography.
The symbolism in the Russian Descent into Hell, Dormition, and Last Judgment icons reveals the church’s understanding of the roles of Eve and Mary in salvation. Although the church literature claimed that Eve caused the Fall of humanity, the Descent into Hell icons depict her as the redeemed, eschatological representation of womankind. The Descent into Hell icons show Christ raising Adam and Eve from hell in imagery that is fulfilled in the Last Judgment icons where Adam and Eve pray for humanity before Christ. By contrast, the Dormition icons reveal Mary as the exemplar and/or intercessor for humanity, the picture of glorified womanhood. The Dormition icons capture the scene just before Mary is raised from her deathbed to heaven in prefiguration of the salvation of humanity as shown in the Last Judgment icons where Mary stands next to Christ with her hands raised in intercession.
In terms of how representative the icons are of what the Russian Orthodox Church believed; the monks were the main icon painters for the first few hundred years of Russian Orthodoxy. The icon painters were held to monastic standards of fasting, prayer, and chastity under the guidance of spiritual masters. Icons cannot be considered mere copies, given that the icon painters contemplated the subject before painting.
The icon painters followed established guidelines on how to depict each holy figure, but they could add new material, which they and the church considered to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. The tradition allowed for variation, but the broad consistency of the representation of Eve and Mary indicated a shared belief in how these women should be depicted. The icons reveal a developing Orthodox tradition where the core elements remained evident no matter how often the tradition was varied. The Moscow School gradually reconfigured the compositional elements of colour, form, and symbolism. Further standardisation of religious culture and art in the sixteenth century led to homogenisation of iconography across Russia until there was a national idiom.
Over the centuries, Eve’s redemption was more implicit in some icons than others and a new genre for her emerged in the sixteenth century in the Deacons’ Door iconography that showed her as redeemable rather than redeemed. The depiction of Mary also varied. Sometimes the Dormition icons showed her in biological terms, while at other times, the symbolism related to one or other of her various roles. This is important because it determines whether we should be looking at icons symbolically or in a more narrative sense.
The church’s reception of the icon painters’ work – for example, the incorporation of icons into an iconostasis – testifies to the church’s recognition of the icon as a theological text. Many of the following icons have not been the subject of analysis before and many are known to specialists only.
Terms
Places
Depending on the context, Moscow refers to Moscow city or Moscow province, although the wider Moscow region was much bigger than the area that we call Moscow today. In the sixteenth century, Moscow also refers to the Muscovite tsardom.
Byzantium was the old name for Constantinople, which is modern-day Istanbul. It was a Greek colony from 657 until its fall in 1453, but it was still known as Byzantium after its official name change. I use the term Byzantium to refer to the capital of the Byzantine Empire and more specifically to the Byzantine Church, whose areas of influence included Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, the Balkans, and the South Slavic areas such as Bulgaria and Serbia.
Kyivan Rus refers to the lands under Kyiv’s leadership in the pre-Mongol period. The Mongols attacked Kyiv in three series of raids between 1237–1241. Prince Vladimir of Kyiv (956–1015, reign 980–1015) baptised the land of Kyivan Rus in 988. During his reign, the lands of Kyivan Rus crossed Ukraine into Russia as far as Novgorod, and its other boundaries included Poland and the Baltic.1
Dates
Some scholars date the Medieval Kyivan Rus period from 862 when Kyivan Rus came into existence, while others argue that the beginning of Prince Vladimir’s reign in 980 was the starting date.
The beginning of the Muscovite period can be counted from the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, or alternatively from the Battle of Ugra in 1480.2 The time between the Kyivan Rus and the Muscovite periods (however one dates the latter) is variously referred to as the Mongol/Appanage/Medieval Rus period. During this time, the Russian grand princes paid monetary tribute to the Mongols.
The Moscow princes came to dominate the principalities after taking over Novgorod in 1471, Tver in 1485, and Pskov in 1510. Some sources date political unification from Ivan III’s reign (1462–1505), or from Vasili III (reign 1505–1533), but most see the beginning of Muscovite tsardom under Ivan IV in 1547 as significant.3 Political unification under one leader was a slow process, and likewise the changes in religious culture and iconography that occurred alongside it were gradual.
Religious Terms
Theotokos means Godbearer, but it is usually translated as the Mother of God. The title of Theotokos was given to Mary at the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431.
Deification is the process whereby people attain union with God through God’s transforming grace. In the Russian Orthodox Church, it is often described as attaining a greater likeness of God.
The Cappadocian Fathers are Basil of Caesarea (330–379), who was bishop of Caesarea; his brother Gregory of Nyssa (335–395), who was bishop of Nyssa; and Gregory of Nazianzus (329–389), who became patriarch of Constantinople.
The Three Holy Hierarchs are Basil of Caesarea (as above); Gregory of Nazianzus (as above); and John Chrysostom (349–407), archbishop of Constantinople.
Chapter Structure
Chapter One gives the background context on influential factors that shaped Russian iconography. It begins with the history and study of Russian icons, including consideration of the human and environmental factors that have affected the number of extant icons. The second section is about the historical, philosophical, and religious factors that shaped the iconography of Eve and Mary. This is followed by a discussion of how the Russian Church understood the roles of Eve, the “New Eve,” and Mary in salvation. The chapter concludes with an assessment of factors that influenced the development of the Descent into Hell and the Dormition iconography from apocryphal origins.
The next two chapters relate to icons painted between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter Two focuses on the representation of Eve as redeemed or redeemable in the Russian Descent into Hell icons beginning with Byzantine-influenced fresco form in Russia before discussing the icons themselves. It traces the adaptations that came to the fore in the Russian iconography for Eve in Novgorod, Pskov, and Moscow where each icon painting centre had a distinctive way of representing her. I examine the meaning of the mixed imagery for Eve in the mid-fifteenth century and the merging of regional styles into a national idiom by the second half of the sixteenth century. The latter part of the chapter discusses the ongoing impact of this process on the iconography of Eve in Moscow, Vologda, Novgorod, Pskov, and Yaroslavl in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Chapter Three begins with the development of the two main forms of Dormition icon, one of which is symbolic, and the other historical before moving to an examination of the expression of Mary’s Dormition in various Russian centres of icon painting. In the latter part of the chapter, I account for the emergence of a more narrative style where Mary as protector of Russia acquired new significance in a marriage of church and state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the reworking of existing genres and the creation of new ones. Chapter Four examines how the icons of this time reflected changes in the church’s understanding of Eve and Mary’s roles in the salvation of humanity. The Quadripartite icon was influential on subsequent iconography, including that of Eve in the Trinity, Last Judgment, and Deacons’ Door genres, which I discuss in detail.
This chapter focuses on the representation of Eve and to a lesser extent, Mary and how both women came to be depicted amongst other theological themes. In this way, salvation history and future eschatology were bound up with didacticism and the place of Moscow in God’s divine plan. I examine the depiction of both Eve and Mary and the eschatological implications of how they are shown in selected Last Judgment icons from Novgorod, Pskov, Moscow, and Yaroslavl, where they can be compared with each other.
The last part of this chapter discusses the Creation story in the iconography on the Deacons’ Doors. These doors, which were a structural extension to the high iconostasis appeared in the late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries. The Deacons’ Doors are significant for introducing a judgmental iconography for Eve where she is shown as fallen and redeemable, but not yet redeemed. This iconography relates to the themes of paradise lost, repentance, and redemption.
Chapter Five presents my findings on the different ways in which the icon painters portrayed deification between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is in support of my overall claim that the icons of Eve and Mary broaden our understanding of how the Russian Church understood Eve as the prefiguration of Mary.
Nicolas Zernov, Eastern Christendom: A Study of the Origin and Development of the Eastern Orthodox Church (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1961), 111; William Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1993, repr., 2004), 9–10.
Lawrence Langer, Historical Dictionary of Medieval Russia, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), xi–1.
Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 23.