The Bari Roots of Russian Carved Icons of St Nicholas. 14th–18th centuries. A.V. Ryndina (Moscow)
The wooden carved icons of St Nicholas in high relief, widespread in the religious Russian art from the 14th century, fall in the category of sacral statuary. A study of this art as part of folklore creativity, with its tendency towards mythologizing all images, has long been exhausted, compelling scholars to seek the typological and essential sources of this phenomenon.
Establishing these sources is precisely the purpose of the present article. In our opinion, this phenomenon goes down to the tradition of the «adoration icons» which stood out during the Komnins era in the system of Byzantine alter barriers located around burials of the saints.
In the context of St Nicholas' iconography the Russian carved icons had an actual predecessor: the silver sculpture of the saint with scenes from his life, which is erected in 1319 over St Nicholas sepulcher in the crypt of the Bari basilica, at the top of the Serbian chased metal alter; it was obviously a «living icon» for believers, embodying in its three-dimensional forms the entirety of the holy remains.
At the same time the large dimensions (170– 180 cm) of the Russian cased icons of the 14th through 16th centuries with their decorative hand-written texts suggest a combination of impressions from the above-mentioned «statue» and the monumental icon sent to St Nicholas' burial place by the Serbian King Stefan Uros III in the 1320s. Consequently, it may be supposed that that the master who carved the earliest St Nicholas icon for the cathedral in Mozhaisk must have visited Bari at the end of the 14th century and was familiar with the donations of the Nemanjices for St Nicholas' burial place.
In the Russian tradition, in its early stages, such cathedrals were probably perceived as sacral-topographical symbols of the Bari basilica on the Russian soil, similarly to the Assumption Cathedrals featuring the «Blacherny miracle».
The placement of St Nicholas high-relief cased icons near the holy gates in the local tier of the icon-stand or behind the choir place, where the saints' sepulchers were located, confirms this hypothesis.
During the different periods in its history such major figures and their iconography (with shield and sword in the saint's hands) were perceived in accordance with the current spiritual values and political requirements and thus acquired specific accents of their meaning and symbolism, from the ecumenical image of the Apostolic Church to the more mundane St Nicholas the Warrior, a protector of the city and the state. The latter logically reflected the evolution of the spiritual and public consciousness from the epoch of Metropolitan Cyprian up till the times of Ivan the Terrible.
Although such sculptures were particularly widespread in the 16th century («the Bari wave» coming to Russia with Bona Sforza and thanks to the activities of Metropolitan Macarius) the carved images of St Nicholas the Miraclemaker of the 17th through the 18th century, even despite certain iconographic alterations, retained their «Bari origin». It was at this time that numerous pilgrimages to St Nicholas burial place were undertaken. Not only pilgrims from Central Russia but also from the Kama regions and Western Siberia visited the holy grave and thus the Bari influence in the interpretation of the saint's image became more concrete.
The memory of the holy land where St Nicholas' body was buried found the fullest embodiment in these sculptural icons. It is for this reason that in the monasteries and cathedrals possessing the renowned miracle-making carved icons the main celebrations in honor of St Nicholas were held precisely on 9 May, the day of transporting the holy remains from Myra of Lycia to the city of Bari.