Some Features of the Icon-painting Art of Academician P. S. T’urin

Abstract

This article reveals the features of a little-studied phenomenon associated with Russian icon-painting in the second half of XIX century. An Academician of painting Platon Semenovich T’urin (1816–1882), who was a senior V. I. Surikov’s contemporary, became one of acknowledged representatives of this movement. In the Vologda State Museum-Reserve there is an icon «The Blessed Virgin Mary is the helper of giving birth» painted by T'urin for the Vologda church of Our Lady of Kazan. It was restored in 2016 by O. V. Karpacheva and remarkable for its innovative image that presents the Virgin with a Baby on her chest and stands closer to a portrait manner than iconic idealization. T’urin worked for many Russian churches but most of his paintings and icons were destroyed due to the anti-religious campaigns in Soviet times. Some traces of his icon-painting work we can find in a photo taken by S. A. Nepein in 1905, which is now in the Vologda State Museum-Reserve. It shows an interior of a home church in honor of the great martyr Alexandra, which was a chapel of a big church in honor of Archangel Michael in Upper Vologda and later demolished. According to archive data, an iconostasis dates from the early 1870s. Its detailed analysis helped to reveal a high-skilled artist’s hand and his representation of prominent Russian intellectuals in XVIII–XIX centuries embodied in the images of saints.