DOI: 10.36871/hon.202001014
Authors
A. V. Markov
Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russian Federation
Abstract
The word primitive as applied to art is a lexical Gallicism, requiring special critical contexts for correct use, and therefore the word was not frequently used in Russian literature. This concept was part not so much of academic research as of art criticism, which argued against academic standard. At the same time, Russian modernism legalized the concept of the Italian primitive as a special mode of optics, as a form of fantasy shared by the artist and the viewer. The article proves that the primitive in Russian culture was not a stylistic, but a plot characteristic of the image, revealed in the proximity of icon-painting images (icon border scenes, altar predellas) to genre scenes, which made it possible to embed the primitive not in the order of canonical veneration, but in the order of a new emotional culture that updated the Russian literary language. Moreover, many characteristics of the primitive, such as color, lighting and compositional solutions directly inherited from European criticism, that stood against classicism and defended the values of national cultural production. Thus, the admiration of Italian primitives was a way to strengthen the role of criticism in the literary and artistic process, that can only coordinate the position of the artist and the audience.
Keywords
duecento, trecento, silver age, Balmont, Vyacheslav Ivanov, national art, icon painting
