Holy Russian and unholy British art: Andrew Graham-Dixon compares an anonymous painter from Pskov with Francis Bacon
A thousand years ago, Prince Vladimir of Kiev decided to put a stop to pagan practices in the newly founded state of Rus. He sent his ambassadors to many lands (so the story goes) to choose an appropriately potent religion for the nation that would become Russia, and they eventually wrote back to him from the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. ''We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men . . . we cannot forget such beauty.'' The persuasive capacities of art should not be underestimated. Vladimir, weighing up his options, adopted the Orthodox religion of the Byzantine empire rather than Western Catholi-cism.
''The Art of Holy Russia'', at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is dedicated to Russian art's attempts, over a span of several centuries, to re-create the beauty that haunted Prince Vladimir's ambassadors. But Russian devotional art is liable to seem forbiddingly alien to modern eyes. To look at an icon such as the St Demetrios of Thessalonike, painted by an anonymous artist for the Church of St Barbara in Pskov in the early 15th century, is to see a painting that allows virtually no room for the forms of response that the average modern viewer, of averagely weak religious convictions, tends to bring to religious art of the past. There is no anecdotal light relief, no hint of narrative, none of those sudden shafts of reality - a dog drinking from a stream, say, or a bright landscape background - that may be admired in the devotional art...
