Sainte Russie

DICK SAYS: Finally the line was short enough to merit an actual visit to the "Sainte Russie" show at the Louvre. In the past, the hordes waiting to get their bags inspected convinced us to walk on by. I guess it must have been the weather, which was warm, sunny and just a little windy. The bridges over the Seine were packed with people and from what I could tell, the Tuileries Gardens were well used, too. So we descended into the Carousel and in five minutes we were in the first rooms of what turned out to be one of the largest temporary exhibitions of Russian art ever mounted. The work was almost exclusively religious in theme and covered the eight centuries between the first rulers of what would become the Russia of the Tsars to the dominant, Europeanizing reign of Peter the Great. I can't begin to describe all spectacular gold and enamel work or the hundred or more icons, both large and small, that covered the walls of this temporary treasure trove. The materials were drawn from churches, libraries, museums and other collections located throughout Russia, and only a portion of them had ever been exhibited outside of the mother country. Frankly, I'd thought of Russian religious art and historical Russian painting in general as rather severe and pretty much confined to gaunt looking saints gilded with gold and stretched thin across worm-eaten pieces of wood. But there was far more than that on offer. Golden diadems, entire sets of gold embossed church doors, requilaries studded with signifying bones and daubed with brilliantly colored enamel-work, illuminated manuscripts, simple stone statuary from the time of Vladimir I of Kiev, the first Christian king of Russia--significant examples of all of them are on display. No, we didn't buy the catalog, but I did read many of the surprisingly straightforward wall texts, and I now have a far greater appreciation of the complexities of the the bloodlines, alliances and antipathies that influenced the formation and flowering of Imperial Russia. Needless to say, one visit isn't enough. I noticed the Wall Street Journal gave the whole thing a rather lukewarm review. (Apparently the sheer volume of the work on display was too much for the reviewer to handle.) But this isn't really the sort of blockbuster show where you check out a couple highlights and figure you've really "done" Surrealism or Caravaggio or whatever. It's very much a historically minded affair and if aesthetics are all that matter to you, it would be easy to be overwhelmed.