New Russian Iconography “The Resurrection with the Descent into Hell”: Compositional Variations

The article deals with the iconography of the Easter holiday in Russia, specifically the image of “The Resurrection with the Descent into Hell”, common to the Russian art of the 17th—18th centuries. This image arises as a result of copying Western European engravings by Russian icon painters. The engravings illustrate the Apostles’ Creed — its fifth formula, which is different from the Orthodox one. In the Orthodox Creed, the fifth formula is called the Resurrection on the Third Day, in the Apostolic one — the Descent into Hell and the Resurrection. The Apostolic Creed is included in the Protestant Bibles, which turn out to be a source of new plots and compositions for Russian painters.

In the process of its existence in Russian art, the new image of “The Resurrection with the Descent into Hell” is filled with additional plots, but most importantly, its main compositional scheme changes.

The two main plots that make it up — the Descent into Hell and the Resurrection — are located on the icon field in different ways, depending on the interpretation of the painters or in strict accordance with the engraving model. Based on the location of the plots that make up the icon, there are distinguished compositional variants with either sequential or vertical arrangement of the plots. Within the first variant, there may be some subgroups: “The Descent into Hell” (whose topos is the underworld) is located below “The Resurrection” (whose topos is earthly space). We see that the iconographers correlate “The Descent into Hell” with the image of “Anastasis” (the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection). This follows from the way the location of the plots changed, when on older monuments — in contradiction with the composition of the engravings — “The Resurrection” had been located below.

The most famous in Russian art is the vertical compositional version. The two plots are located strictly above each other, forming the central axis of the entire iconographic work, around which other storylines are added. In accordance with the Western European engravings, “The Resurrection” is located here in the upper register. These various modifications must be taken into consideration in order to understand both the genesis and the main content of the new iconography.

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