Stroganov school

The Stroganov school is the conventional name for the last major school of Russian icon painting, which flourished in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the patronage of the wealthy Stroganov merchant family. Its name comes from the Stroganov inscriptions on the backs of icons attributed to Moscow masters such as Prokopiy Chirin and Nazary Istomin Savin, though many of these painters worked for the tsar rather than in the Stroganovs' own workshops. What unites the school is finish rather than origin: small, exquisitely delicate panels in which refinement of palette, gold and silver half-tints, dense paint layers and needle-fine detail serve richly robed figures set against invented, ornamental landscapes. It is the last flowering of the icon tradition before Westernizing reforms.

Defining characteristics

• Small, exquisitely diminutive panels with miniaturist finish
• Refined palette of half-tints with gold and silver highlights
• Dense paint layers and graphic precision in the smallest details
• Fragile, slightly mannered poses and delicate gestures
• Sumptuously detailed vestments, jewellery and embroidered cloth
• Intricate fantasy landscape backgrounds behind the figures

Key figures

• Prokopiy Chirin (active early 17th century) — Moscow icon painter in the Stroganov circle whose signed panels include the John the Baptist of the 1620s
• Nazary Istomin Savin (active 1614-1622) — Master of the Annunciation (1614-1615) and other minutely detailed icons and liturgical commissions

Example works

• John the Baptist (Desert Angel) — Prokopiy Chirin (1620s)
• Annunciation — Nazary Istomin Savin (1614-1615)

Sources

• Stroganov school - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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