An iconic moment

One hot afternoon in Moscow we decided to hire bikes and cycle through Gorky Park, on the banks of the Moskva river, where the breeze would cool us. But the shuttered booth we saw from the bridge as we entered was, in hindsight, more ominous than we realised. Still optimistic, we criss-crossed the park, hoping that the rare scooter or odd-looking bike we glimpsed might mean a sole kiosk, somewhere, was still trading. Slowly, station after station, we began to accept that we were going to be defeated. The counters were inexplicably closed, perhaps something to do with it being paratrooper day – the park was thronged with crowds of paratroopers clad in white and blue striped tanktops getting drunk as they could – or because it was a Wednesday, but the cause didn’t really matter when it was the effect we cared about. 

Peter the Great sails his stone ship

Hot and now bothered, we didn’t feel like hanging out with the increasingly boisterous paratroopers, but nor did we want to admit defeat and slink back home early. Could we salvage the afternoon? We flicked through the guidebook, and through our phones, in desperation. This was not how we’d planned it. 

Then we found a museum, near-ish, closing soon, but with a real treasure inside. So began another long dash under the Moscow sun; perhaps our ranging through Gorky park had given us the appetite. We charged along the bankside of the Moskva, only stopping to photograph the ludicrous statue of Peter the Great before carrying on, checking our watches, praying we’d make it in time. When we got to the ticket office, I was sweating like a fat man after his seventh hotdog, but we’d beaten the clock. 

The Tretyakov Gallery. I was elated. Tamsin, my partner, less so. Pity her for she had to gamely put up with my obsession. The treasure it contained was The Trinity, a painting by Andrei Rublev, Russia’s greatest icon painter. 

I’d recently seen Andrei Rublev, the three and half hour Tarkvosky biopic and read Seiobo There Below, in which one of the characters becomes obsessed with a Rublev painting, the Trinity. The film (spoiler: it’s not the kind of film you can really ‘spoil’) ends with a remarkable long pan over the painting. I felt I had some connection to this painting, some reason to seek it out and see it in the flesh. 

It was the most remarkable thing I saw all trip. Tamsin says I stared at it for ten minutes. It wasn’t long enough. It’s a little difficult to describe what was so good, but it is a startling painting. The expressions of the angels dance from your grasp just as you think you’ve pinned them down; the central figure’s robe falls in sharp blue geometric lines from his shoulder; the feet of the figures on either side curl under the table, coquettish and/or holy; the effect is mesmeric, and you feel you are looking on the work of a true genius.

The Trinity (with reflected reverent legs)

On the plane home, as I mentioned earlier, I read Ways of Seeing by John Berger. The following passage struck me: 

‘When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image…

…the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction. It is no longer what its image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but what it is…

…before the Virgin of the Rocks the visitor to the National Gallery would be encouraged by nearly everything he might have heard and read about the painting to feel something like this: ‘I am in front of it. I can see it. This painting by Leonardo is unlike any other in the world. The National Gallery has the real one. If I look at this painting hard enough, I should somehow be able to feel its authenticity. The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci: it is authentic and therefore it is beautiful.’

I confess. That could be a description of me before The Trinity. I was experiencing the ‘bogus religiosity’ that Bergers condemns as part of the fetishisation of the original by an elite culture that wishes to preserve value in a world of reproductions where magic or religion no longer hold any force (and so the painting, as a commercial entity, must trade on something else). 

However Berger’s argument here was particularly about oil painting, not about icons. Icons have always been both about what a work uniquely says and what it uniquely is, in Berger’s formulation. They are all about the ecstatic or religious experience of the viewer before the object itself. They are not just representations of holy scenes, but are holy themselves. That is why people would travel hundreds of miles to see them.

But for a modern society that is largely irreligious, this aspect of icons, that they have ontological value, has disappeared because you can’t have a religious experience with a holy object if you don’t believe in the divine. Yet modern techniques of reproduction, in this case the Tarkovsky film, have actually recreated an original effect of The Trinity. What reproduction bastardised with oil paintings, that is, the addition of value to the original work as the authentic, it has resurrected with icons, because the search to see the authentic, original work, puts the modern pilgrim in the shoes of the medieval pilgrim who was seeking precisely the same thing, albeit for different reasons.

What does this mean? It means I got a little closer to the experience of someone who saw this icon when it was made, or just after, with the obvious and significant caveat that I did not feel the presence of God (though I did feel the presence of genius). 

Another icon from the Tretyakov

To return to a theme from my first post about Russia, questions of ‘seeing Russia’ have been on my mind since we returned. As I read the Berger book on the plane and thought back to The Trinity and its powerful effect on me, I felt I’d been given a glimpse through a wormhole to a Russia we never otherwise saw: pious, old, less class-riven. This glimpse also hinted at the vast swathes of Russia that were still unexplored. 

I hadn’t expected to ‘see Russia’, in the totality of that phrase, over the few days of our trip, but we’d got a sense of the broad contours, a tracing of the boundaries, and a few moments of illumination. The map was beginning to take shape, the country coming into focus. Russia was big, Russia was old, Russia was grand, Russia was hot-blooded and mad, Russia was stuck in my head.