Irina Pugacheva
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
Recent research into Tuscan painting of the 13th century (previously not always available for study, for example, miracle-working icons) has significantly increased the number of monuments of this period.
At the beginning of the century, icons in Tuscany were often copies of imported art, such as small relief images and miniatures. After the fourth crusade the situation changes when icons by Greek artists begin to appear in Tuscany. Around the second quarter of the century Byzantine icons begin to be copied in great numbers, but the style and manner of these images could be very different as they depended on the original imagе.
From the middle of the century a rapid improvement of icons’ pictorial qualities takes place, but at the same time their deviation from the Greek prototypes begins. The diversity of icons allows us to identify different schools and artists.
In the history of art, with its focus on the problems of dating and authorship, a stylistic method of analysis is usually used. At the moment, this method has exhausted itself because the icon is inseparable from the religious function. That is why in this research we intend to combine the cultural and religious studies with the aspect of the painting’s development itself. The rapid stylistic departure from the Byzantine imagery of Tuscan art had its own reasons, which were based on a specific attitude to the sacred image in Italy and the nature of the icon worship.
A famous and miraculous icon and its derivatives; the icon for various religious functions; the icon as a copy; the icon as an imitation of another icon, all of these aspects are not only different areas of culture but are the different aspects of artistic life of the icon, a different story of its glorification and reflection in different periods of time. This complicated way of researching allows us to understand specific facts and to justify the dependence of one image from another, and the means to restore the chronology and to trace the painting of the monument in its original life.