In his latest book, Oleg Tarasov contributes to a sizeable body of literature on the reception of Russian icons in the Belle Époque (1871–1914). Composed of four loosely interconnected chapters, the book focuses on the connoisseur and art adviser Bernard Berenson (d. 1959), the critic Pavel Muratov (d. 1950), the collector Ilʹia Ostroukhov (d. 1929), and the priest and theorist Pavel Florenskii (d. 1937). Tarasov proposes two main reasons for studying these individuals together: a shared interest in medieval panel painting “on gold background” and their role in the acceptance of medieval images as “pure art.” In the first three chapters the author pays special attention to a cluster of parallel developments in the discovery of Russian icons and early Italian panel painting. To hold the project together he highlights the research of Muratov in Italy and elsewhere and western European visitors to Ostroukhov’s icon museum in Moscow, as well as a select number of letters between individuals on both sides. Some of the most enlightening observations involve unpublished sources kept in the Tretʹiakov Gallery archives.

Tarasov does not define what he means by “pure art” but rather characterizes how his quartet of figures draw attention to the “individuality of the artist” (13) and collectively abandon a mindset wherein “the artistic aspect [of the icon] was valued to the extent to which it evoked religious sentiments and proximity to God” (18). Throughout the book the onus is on “primitive” Italian panels and early Russian icons to conform to the categories of the “educated European collector and artist” (97), as Tarasov describes Ostroukhov. There is little discussion of pre-nineteenth-century texts that would aid the reader in understanding precisely what was new in the emergent category of “pure art.” For instance, one of Tarasov’s key claims in Ch. 3 is that Ostroukhov was the “first to elevate them [i.e., Russian icons] to the ranks of world art treasures—in other words, to create that ‘astonishing collection of genuine masterpieces’” (97). It is certainly true that Russian and European elites did not speak of icons as masterpieces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the term “master” derives from Greek (maistor), and Byzantine and early Slavic writers often spoke of the “workshop style” or “master’s style” (masterskoe pisʹmo). Without understanding a bit of this earlier context it is difficult to assess just what is groundbreaking in the aesthetic judgments of Ostroukhov and Muratov. On the one hand, they may have been recovering an old and forgotten—as much as discovering a novel—way of appreciating the stylistic finesse of a virtuoso iconographer. On the other, the category of an “autonomous work of art” (171) itself might have been as much a medieval and east European as a modern and western development. The risk is that one repeats a story of assimilation when all along there were relevant categories at play within Orthodoxy itself. This point is critical given that, as Tarasov points out, “the way we see and understand the medieval Russian icon today is largely a legacy of the culture of the Belle Époque” (171).

Each chapter in the book can be read separately, which increases the text’s usefulness in the classroom and for research. However, Tarasov is aware that his four figures diverge widely in agenda and intellectual temperament. The biggest difficulty comes in Ch. 4 with Florenskii, given that the latter claims the Orthodox liturgy as the ideal viewing context for icons, thus delivering them back to the world of “religious sentiment.” As Tarasov notes, Florenskii’s analytic framework derives from “religious experience” (137), yet he seems unbothered by the trouble of reconciling the theologian’s approach to the stylistically alert connoisseurship of Berenson as well as Muratov or Ostroukhov. In the end Tarasov seems more invested in the metaphysical and symbolic musings of Florenskii, which no doubt best encapsulates the thrust of Florenskii’s wider ouevre. But symbolism is distant in spirit from the elevation of the icon to “pure art.” In sum it seems to this reviewer that the book, as much as uncovering similarities of approach to icons during the Belle Époque, reveals key differences, although these largely remain implicit in the text. Some of these differences might have been more apparent had the author consulted the extensive work of other scholars who have written about the reception of icon in modernity: Wendy Salmond, Maria Taroutina, Andrew Spira, Clemena Antonova, Jefferson Gattrall, Douglas Greenfield, and others. There is disappointingly little engagement with the wider scholarly literature.