174 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010

Figure 2. Constantinople, The Vladimir Mother of God, early twelfth century. Tempera on canvas
and wood, 104 x 69 cm. Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.
 The icon as performer and as performative utterance
The sixteenth-century Vladimir Mother of God in the Moscow
Dormition Cathedral
MARIE E. GASPER-HULVAT
Within the nine-sentence catalog entry for a sixteenth-
century Russian icon (fig. 1) in the Guggenheim’s 2005
“Russia!” exhibition, only two sentences pertain to
this particular object. Such a choice by curator Valerie
Hillings was hardly an omission: The other seven
sentences concern the twelfth-century icon (fig. 2) from
which the sixteenth-century one was copied, and detail
the former’s prominent place in Russian history.1 Indeed,
the meaning of the sixteenth-century icon is tightly
bound to its prototype, which did not come to New
York. In most conventional accounts, the image on both
icons is important because of the history Hillings recites;
however, I propose that the history is made important
by the sixteenth-century icon and the political program
of its creators. This icon can be understood as both
performer and performative utterance, participating in
and enacting a narrative that established Moscow as the
site for the teleological conclusion of Christian history. I
seek to pursue the implications of the twentieth-century
discipline of performance studies for this particular icon
as a case study for further elucidating the meaning and
function of icons in general.2
Such an approach is not unprecedented; recent
scholarship on Byzantine and Russian icons includes
several examples where authors utilize terms and ideas
related to performance studies. Alexei Lidov organized
a significant body of work related to “hierotopy,” a term
This article is expanded from a presentation given at the April
2008 Frick Symposium. I am deeply indebted to Dale Kinney, whose
mentorship made this project possible.
1. V. Hillings, “The Virgin of Vladimir,” in Russia!: Catalogue of the
Exhibition (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2005), pp.
6–7, no. 13.
2. I draw upon the work of J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and Rebecca
Schneider. Other useful sources for the theoretical grounding of
performance and performativity include: H. Bial, The Performance
Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). J. Loxley,
Performativity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); The Sage
Handbook of Performance Studies, ed. D. S. Madison and J. Hamera
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.; London; and New Delhi: Sage Publications,
2006).
he coined to designate the study of the ongoing creation
of sacred space, particularly within the Byzantine
sphere; this field of research broadly encompasses
performances in such locations and the means by
which such performances cocreated the spaces in
which they were enacted.3 The philologist Boris
Uspensky, in an article discussing liturgical movement
within ecclesiastical space, compares the iconostasis
and solea of the Orthodox church to “something not
unlike a proscenium,” a term that typically denotes the
architectural structure that surrounds the visible areas of
a theatrical stage.4 In her discussion of Byzantine vision,
Nicoletta Isar describes one image as “conflating speech
act and visual sign,”5 thereby making use of the term
conventionally used as equivalent to the “illocutionary
act” coined by the progenitor of performativity studies,
J. L. Austin.6 Most extensively, Bissera Pentcheva devotes
an entire article to “The Performative Icon,” in which she
discusses the multi-sensory experiential characteristics of
the dynamic icon in its intended ecclesiastical context.7
3. Specifically with respect to the dynamic aspects of hierotopical
projects, Lidov notes, “Performativity, dramatic changes, [and] the lack
of strict fixation shaped a vivid, spiritually intensive, and concretely
influential environment.” A. Lidov, “Hierotopy. The Creation of Sacred
Spaces as a Form of Creativity and as a Subject of Cultural History,” in
Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval
Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), p. 39. See also,
A. Lidov, “The Flying Hodegetria: The Miraculous Icon as Bearer of
Sacred Space,” in The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and
Renaissance, ed. E. Thunoe and G. Wolf (Rome 2004), pp. 291–321; A.
Lidov, “The Sacred Space of Relics,” in Christian Relics in the Moscow
Kremlin, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Radunitsa, 2000) pp. 13–18.
4. B. A. Uspensky, “‘Khozhdenie posolon’ i Struktura Sakral’nogo
Prostranstva v Moskovskoi Rusi,” in Hierotopy, ed. A. Lidov (ibid.), pp.
544–545.
5. N. Isar, “The Vision and Its ‘Exceedingly Blessed Beholder’:
Of Desire and Participation in the Icon,” RES 38 (Autumn 2000): 62.
Italics mine. Isar entitled her article in Lidov’s Hierotopy “Chorography
(Chôra, Chorós)—A Performative Paradigm of Creation of Sacred Space
in Byzantium.”
6. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1962).
7. B. V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” The Art Bulletin 88, no.
4 (December 2006):631–655.
176 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Figure 1. The School of Dionysius, The Vladimir Mother of God
with Feasts and Saints, early sixteenth century. Tempera on
canvas and wood, 107.5 x 69 cm. Dormition Cathedral of the
Kremlin, Moscow.
However, in the first three of these examples, the
use of performance and performativity terminology
primarily serves to convey more effectively the authors’
arguments with respect to a variety of theoretical
frameworks, performance not among them. And while
Pentcheva’s article explicitly takes performativity
as its focus, it highlights the experiential aspects of
performance with reference to Byzantine image theory.
In comparison to previous studies, I seek to amplify the
use of performance and performativity theory in order to
illustrate the value of such application within the iconic
milieu.
Historical contexts
In the case of the aforementioned sixteenth-century
icon, the central image depicts the Vladimir Mother of
God, or Vladimirskaia, framed by a border of alternating
images of important saints and the twelve main annual
liturgical feasts. It was painted around 1514, and, for
purposes of brevity and clarity, I hereafter refer to this
icon as the “1514” Vladimirskaia, with the caveat
that the 1514 dating is far from conclusive.8 I refer to
the early twelfth-century icon, of which the “1514”
Vladimirskaia is a copy, as the “Tretiakov Vladimirskaia,”
due to its present location in the Tretiakov Gallery
collection in Moscow.
The Tretiakov icon was not Russian-made, but was
imported from Byzantium to Kyiv between 1125 and
1131, a gift from the Byzantine patriarch to the Grand
Prince of Kyiv. During the third quarter of the twelfth
century, the Mother of God began to perform miracles
through this icon. It was observed levitating in mid-air
in the center of its church of residence, in southern Rus’
near Kyiv. This was interpreted as a sign that the Mother
of God desired that her icon be relocated, causing
Andrei Bogoliubski, the son of the grand prince, to
move the icon north to Vladimir, the point past which
his horses refused to advance due to another Marian
intervention.9 She then proceeded to enact further
miracles through this icon, intervening in history to
protect the icon’s present city of residence. In 1395, the
icon first visited Moscow, when it performed its most
renowned miracle, the delivery of Moscow from the
impending Mongol attack led by Timur. In each of these
events, the miracle-working properties of the Tretiakov
8. Russian chronicles note a flurry of activity in 1514 with respect
to the twelfth-century Vladimirskaia, including a significant renovation
involving cleaning, repainting, and adding a new frame. Additionally,
between 1513 and 1515 the interior of the Kremlin Dormition
Cathedral was redecorated by members of the School of Dionysius,
the same group to which the sixteenth-century icon is attributed. It
is entirely plausible that the icon was created in conjunction with
this commission or to commemorate the renovation of the Byzantine
Vladimirskaia. However, other sources may indicate its production
prior to 1511, under the tenure of Metropolitan Simon; and twentieth-
century scholar Engelina Smirnova dates the icon to 1519. I. Bentchev,
“Zum Verhältnis von Original, Kopie und Replik am Beispiel der
Gottesmutter von Vladimir und anderer russischer Ikonen,” in Russische
Ikonen: Neue Forschungen, ed. Eva Haustein-Bartsch (Recklinghausen:
Verlag Aurel Bongers, 1991), p. 162, fn. 57. E. Smirnova, Moscow
Icons: 14th–17th centuries, trans. Arthur Shkorovsky-Raffé (Oxford:
Phaidon, 1989), p. 298.
9. E. Sendler, Les Icônes de la Mère de Dieu (Paris: Desclée de
Brouwer, 1992), pp. 143–144.
 Gasper-Hulvat: The icon as performer and as performative utterance
Vladimirskaia were consistently large-scale, public, and
political, as opposed to many other Russian miracle-
working icons that were credited with personal, healing
miracles.10
I deliberately avoid invoking the term ”original”
to describe the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia, despite the
significant temptation to do so. When describing Russian
icons, this term is highly problematic and ambiguous.
For a medieval Orthodox Russian, every icon was in fact
a copy, with the ”original” being the icon’s prototype,
the person in flesh and spirit who was represented in the
iconic image. Yet this unity of flesh and spirit was itself
an icon of the ultimate prototype, with humanity having
been made in the image (eikōn) of the likeness of God.
For icons depicting Christ and Mary, such duplication
becomes even more complex, since the Incarnation
was an occasion where God purposefully adopted
human flesh in the body of Christ. In Christ, then, we
encounter a visible image of God; in Mary, we find the
fleshly materiality into which the logos entered in order
to create the visible Christ.11 Thus, as a reference to the
Incarnation, every icon of Mary is a justification of the
orthodox (in the etymological sense of “right belief”)
veneration of all icons.
An icon of Mary is dependent upon the identity of
its prototype—Mary’s human body—for its validity
as an object suitable for veneration. However, when
dealing with copies of a miracle-working icon such
as the Vladimirskaia, the identity of the prototype
is destabilized. The miracle-working icon acquires
something akin to the status of a relic due to the miracles
it has performed. Its copies depict not only the image of
the Mother of God, but also the tangible miracle-working
icon itself. The “original” thus becomes ambiguously
multiple. The singular identity of the miracle-working
object is inscribed by means of significant historical
events. Such an identity exceeds the conventional icon’s
status as a simple representation of a saintly prototype,
as more recent history is implicated in its meaning.
By interacting with the icon within the context of its
miracle-working and in expectation of future similar
miracles, the worshippers helped to establish the identity
of the icon and its copies performatively.
10. P. Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), p. 103.
11. Isar, “The Vision” (see note 5), pp. 58–59. B. V. Pentcheva,
Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 1.
177
In the medieval Eastern Orthodox context, there is
easy slippage between the categories of sacred and
miracle-working—for every object within the church
has the potential to work miracles at any moment.12 It
is unclear to what extent the medieval Russian viewer
understood the copies of the Vladimirskaia to be
equivalent to the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia. For example,
shortly after the 1395 miracle defeating Timur, two
copies of the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia were painted,
one each for the Moscow and Vladimir Dormition
Cathedrals (figs. 3 and 4). Scholars have proposed that
during the fifteenth century, the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia
traveled repeatedly between these two cathedrals, and
the copies were used as replacements for the Tretiakov
Vladimirskaia when it was visiting the other city.13 If this
was the case, we can understand the copies as taking
on the role of the twelfth-century icon in its absence—
performing the Vladimirskaia image in its stead and
through its repetition. The replica purportedly granted
the same access to the Mother of God and her protective
powers.
However, if the copies were entirely equivalent to
the older icon, why would the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia
have needed to travel between the two cities at all? In
an entirely anachronistic analogy, could we understand
the copy to be acting as a sort of understudy, taking on
the role of the “star” at times when the more famous
actor was unable to play the title role in the liturgical
drama? When the understudy takes the stage, the
performance is no less valid an execution if the leading
actor had played the role. However, if the audience
seeks to behold the renowned performer, not the
understudy, the performance can never be quite as
authentic without the aura of the star on stage. Yet if
the audience is more attentive to the ensemble
production or the nuances and talent of the
understudy’s performance, the absence of the star
performer’s aura becomes much less significant.
12. Lidov, “The Sacred Space” (see note 3), p. 14.
13. A. I. Anisimov proposed this theory; see Bogomater’
Vladimirskaia: K 600-letiyu Sreteniia ikony Bogomateri Vladimirskoi
v Moskve 26 avgusta (8 sentyabrya) 1395 goda (Moscow: Avangard,
1995), p. 48; L. A. Shchennikova, “Chudotvornaia Ikona ‘Bogomater’
Vladimirskaia’ kak ‘Odigitriia Evangelista Luki,’” in Chudotvornaia
Ikona: V Vizantii i Drevnei Rusi (Moscow: Martis, 1996), p. 265.
David B. Miller also attempts to discern the use and location of the
Tretiakov Vladimirskaia during the fifteenth century, and even questions
its permanent placement in Moscow prior to Ivan IV’s reign: D. B.
Miller, “Legends of the Icon of Our Lady of Vladimir: A Study of the
Development of Muscovite National Consciousness,” Speculum 43,
no. 10 (October 1968):659–660.
178 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Figure 3. Andrei Rublëv (?), The Vladimir Mother of God, early
fifteenth century. Tempera on canvas and wood, 102 x 68 cm.
Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin, Moscow.
The value of the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia, and
the equivalence of its copies to their prototype,
would entirely depend upon the expectations of its
audience: clergy, state leaders, soldiers, commoners.
The “scripts”—the acts of worship, the liturgical rites,
and the processions in which she participated—
significantly established and maintained the identity
of the Vladimirskaia. The “understudy,” or replica,
could meaningfully, or happily, participate in these
performances without making them “infelicitous” or
“hollow,” to borrow terms from Austin.14 Nevertheless,
14. Austin proposed six conditions that were “necessary for the
smooth or ‘happy’ functioning of a performative,” the second of which
was that “the particular persons and circumstances in a given case
Figure 4. The Vladimir Mother of God, early fifteenth century.
Tempera on canvas and wood, 102.2 x 69.5 cm. Vladimir and
Suzdal Museum of History, Art, and Architecture, Vladimir.
the renown of the specific miracle-working object, the
Tretiakov Vladimirskaia, continued to be utilized by
clergy and statesmen to enact performances symbolically
to help unify Russian lands ideologically. It is significant
that the auratic twelfth-century icon found its permanent
home in Moscow, while a replica remained in the icon’s
namesake city of Vladimir.
must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure
invoked.” In this situation, it appears the duplicates were appropriate
for the procedure of granting access to the Mother of God. This would
be in contrast to, for example, a contemporary Catholic image of the
Virgin Mary, which could not provide the Orthodox believer the same
kind of access, or be used in liturgy or worship without committing
heresy, therefore constituting an “unhappy” functioning of procedures.
See Austin (note 6), pp. 14–15.
 Gasper-Hulvat: The icon as performer and as performative utterance
The identity of any one of these iterations of the
Vladimirskaia wavers between singularity as object and
multiplicity as replicated image. In performativity theory,
the identity of the embodied self comes to be defined by
the repeated enactment of behaviors that are socially
defined by self and others simultaneously defining their
own identities. Identity is an action, rather than a state,
doing rather than being. Identity is performed by an actor-
subject who did not entirely exist prior to the act itself. The
entity that embodies—or does—an identity is both subject
and object, simultaneously acting and acted upon.15
Human beings “do” performative identities in the
ontological constructions of theorists such as Judith
Butler. However, one questions whether ascribing
performative characteristics to an object, instead of
a person, fundamentally alters the nature of those
characteristics. In the case of the Vladimirskaia icons, the
objects were certainly acted upon by socially defined
forces; their identities were activated by the workings of
people or spiritual beings. They also performed actions;
in anthropological terms, they constituted “objects with
agency.”16 Lastly, the actions of Mary become the actions
of her icon and vice versa, because an icon and the
spiritual entity it depicts are not entirely distinguishable.
Furthermore, the iconic object explicitly participated
in the citation of repeated cultural codes, as each
singular miracle cited and built upon the iterative power
of previous and future miracles. The miracle-performing
icon participates in an oscillation between the singular,
present apprehension and the pervasive, ongoing
collective history of repetitions. In addition, the miracles
themselves take part in a similar tension, as inexplicable
interventions of the immaterial and everlasting into
material, temporal existence. The miracle represents a
vivid moment of inutterability, a space in a narrative that
can always only be partially filled. The narrative can only
hope to bracket the indescribable with meaning, and
that meaning can only be constructed by appropriating
evocative brackets from previously uttered narratives.17
The miracle requires a co-construction of comprehension
in partnership with other forms of comprehension
already in existence and coming into existence.
15. J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 17, 24–25.
16. A term described by A. Gell in Art and Agency: An
Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
17. My interpretation of miracles is significantly influenced by a
discussion of death’s performative nature: P. Phelan, “Andy Warhol:
Performances of Death in America,” in Performing the Body, Performing
the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London, New York:
Routledge, 1999), p. 229.
179
The replicas of the Vladimirskaia were collective
iterations created through the combined efforts of
their icon painters, spiritual guides, and beholders. It
was in the repeated enactment of its image that the
Vladimirskaia also established its identity. Paradoxically,
the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia became more significant and
more singular as it was copied repeatedly. By marking
the prototype’s absence as significant, as requiring
remediation by means of a duplicate, the duplicate itself
performatively crafted the identity of the prototype. And
its copies acquired greater significance as the singular
prototype continued to be revered and to perform more
miracles. The identity of embodied repetition applies not
only to the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia, but even more so to
the “1514” Vladimirskaia. For the “1514” icon repeated
the Vladimirskaia image, but it also puts forth a unique
combination of repetitions with the addition of the
framing images painted upon the same board.
Both the saints and the feasts on the frame of the
“1514” icon duplicated images that occupied tiers of the
iconostasis, or icon screen, that separates the altar from
the nave in Orthodox churches. The festal images—but
not the saints—were specifically copied from a gold
frame or oklad donated to the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia at
the beginning of the fifteenth century (fig. 5). This oklad
was brought in 1410 from Constantinople to Moscow
by Metropolitan Photius, a Byzantine ecclesiastic newly
appointed Metropolitan of all Russia by the patriarch of
Constantinople.18
The replication of the oklad upon the sixteenth-
century icon leads us to consider how the icon might
have been useful as a performative utterance by the
Muscovite ruling elite. In the early sixteenth century,
Muscovite rulers, both sacred and secular, attempted
to establish a teleological narrative placing Moscow
at the center of the end of Christian history.19 After
Constantinople’s fall in 1453, Russia came to see itself
as the only truly Christian nation left on earth, and
18. A. Gordine, “En quête de la composition originelle de la
Vierge de Vladimir,” in Cahiers Archeologiques 50 (2002):141. The
Nikonian Chronicle, ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky, trans. Serge A. and Betty
Jean Zenkovsky (Princeton, N.J.: The Darwin Press, The Kingston
Press, 1988), vol. 4, p. 175. Alternatively, it is possible that the frame
was created in Moscow by Greek artisans, see T. V. Tolstaya, The
Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1979), p. 67.
19. This included the tracing of the Muscovite princes’ genealogical
line to a certain Prus, a mythical brother of the Roman Emperor
Augustus, and the marriage of Grand Prince Ivan III to the last
Byzantine emperor’s niece, Sophia Palaeologina, who had spent
her youth in Rome and who introduced Byzantine court ceremony
180 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
Figure 5. Constantinople, Oklad for the Vladimir Mother of
God, early fifteenth century. Embossed gold and gold filigree,
105 x 70 cm. Museum of the Kremlin, Moscow.
Muscovites as inhabiting the “Third Rome,” following
Constantinople as the second. Furthermore, Muscovite
leaders envisioned themselves as guarding the New
and symbolism to Moscow. The most important document of this
narrative came from a monk named Filofei, who wrote a letter some
time between 1515 and 1523 in which he built a theological defense
of Moscow as the only legitimate capital of the only remaining
autonomous Orthodox nation and its princes as divinely ordained
protectors of the faith. “Filofei’s Concept of the ‘Third Rome,’” in
Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 850–1700, ed. Basil Dmytryshyn,
3d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1991), p. 260; N. V.
Riasanovsky and M. D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, 7th ed. (New
York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 99–100, 115; A.
Voyce, Moscow and the Roots of Russian Culture (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1964), p. 151; S. Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s
Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), p. 24.
Jerusalem—the location of Christ’s return at the imminent
end of the world.20 This belief was also based on a
perceived inheritance of the legacy of Constantinople.
Muscovite leaders amassed a significant quantity of
relics related both to Constantinople and Jerusalem in
an attempt to transfer these cities’ holiness to Moscow.21
Additionally, both state and church leaders sought to
reaffirm the Byzantine legacy by marking the importance
of the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia. This monument
functioned as the palladium of the Russian people in
ceremonies and ideologies adopted from Byzantine
practice and connected Moscow to Constantinople via
a geographical route of succession that Muscovite rulers
sought to establish as canonical.
In preceding centuries, Constantinople had given
the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia to Kyiv, and subsequently
it moved through Vladimir to Moscow. The seat of the
Metropolitan, along with the Muscovite ruling dynasty’s
ancestors, followed this same path. Muscovite rulers
sought to promote this transference as an indication
of the divine plan to bring the locus of Christian holy
power to Moscow, which their dynasty was destined to
lead. Furthermore, in its reiteration on the “1514” icon,
the gold oklad—a gift from Constantinople to Moscow
by means of a Metropolitan—supported the symbolic
argument for Moscow as heir to the Byzantine legacy.
It reminded viewers of Constantinople’s continued
involvement in Russia’s, and specifically Moscow’s,
development through history, not just once in the gift of
the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia in the twelfth century, but
actively and regularly through the era of Constantinople’s
decline, presumably in order to prepare its successor for
the monumental charge of protecting the faith.
Constantinopolitans had developed an elaborate
cult and ceremonial practice devoted to the Mother of
God. This included the renowned “Tuesday miracle”
in which, every week, the Hodegetria icon levitated
and spun in mid-air, in conjunction with a procession
around the city. By incorporating the entire urban
space, these processions actualized the whole city as
the Heavenly Jerusalem, a sort of massive living icon.22
Muscovites adopted the Constantinopolitan practice
20. M. S. Flier, “Till the End of Time: The Apocalypse in Russian
Historical Experience Before 1500,” in Orthodox Russia: Belief
and Practice under the Tsars, ed. V. A. Kivelson and R. H. Greene
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp.
127–158.
21. Displayed during important liturgies throughout the church
year, these relics reassured the populace of their country’s holiness and
its pivotal place in salvation history. See Lidov, “The Sacred Space”
(note 3), p. 13.
 Gasper-Hulvat: The icon as performer and as performative utterance
of processing through the city with icons, particularly
the Vladimirskaia, in order to actualize the Heavenly
Jerusalem in their own midst, and even reenacted the
“Tuesday miracle.”23 Just as the Constantinopolitans had
perceived the miracles of the Hodegetria—the palladium
of the Byzantine empire—as assurance of the Mother of
God’s continued active protection, Muscovites also took
the persistence of miracles associated with the Mother
of God as indication of her adoption of the new capital
of Orthodoxy. And as had been the case in Byzantium,
devotion to her was powerfully connected to loyalty to
the state.24 In citations of previously established codes,
Muscovites observed and created the perception of their
city as destined to assume the mantle of Constantinople.
Such efforts attempted to substantially transfer the
sacred space that had been the city of Constantinople
to Moscow, not simply to recreate the image of
Constantinople (and, by extension, the Holy Land), but
also to fashion the Russian city upon the prototype of
these holy cities—as if cities could model a prototype
in the same way as icons. For these Christians, two
spaces could fully participate in one another and not just
symbolically. In the justification of Moscow’s place as
Constantinople’s rightful heir, in the collection of relics,
and in the adoption and performance of processions and
rituals based on Constantinopolitan models, Moscow
became Constantinople and the Heavenly Jerusalem,
thus ensuring that Moscow was the appropriate
geographical location for Christ’s arrival at the End
of Days.
Within the frame of the “1514” Vladimirskaia, the
addition of the images of the saints to the oklad’s feasts
further supplemented Moscow’s claim to the legacy of
Constantinople. Each saint is depicted in identical scale
and style, despite the fact that the saints range from
fourth-century Church fathers such as Basil the Great
and John Chrysostom to fourteenth-century Russian
Metropolitans Peter and Alexei, who were key figures
22. See Lidov, “The Flying Hodegetria” (note 3), and Pentcheva
(note 11).
23. A 1498 podea, or embroidered panel that hangs below an
icon as adornment, illustrates this miracle with recognizable images of
contemporary Russian dignitaries. See Lidov, “The Flying Hodegetria”
(note 3), pp. 294–295, and A. Lidov, “Miracle-Working Icons of the
Mother of God,” in Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in
Byzantine Art, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Milan: Skira Editore, 2000), p. 53.
24. This connection originated in Mary’s replacing Roman civic
goddesses such as Tyche and Victory. See Pentcheva (note 11), p. 11.
In Russia, military generals visited the Vladimirskaia before battle and
following victory; princes and other state servants swore allegiance to
Moscow before the icon. See Tolstaya (note 18), p. 14.
181
in helping Moscow rise to its present prominence.25 The
depicted saints are exclusively ecclesiastics, an obvious
fact for contemporary viewers, due to the sharp visual
contrast in contemporary Russian painting between
priests’ brightly ornamented robes and the somber,
plain robes of monastics. Lidov argues that liturgical
vestments of the period can be read as microcosms of
ecclesiastical space,26 and although the means by which
these robes were depicted iconographically departs
significantly from the objects’ actual appearances,
we nevertheless can treat the icon’s images as citing
a similar meaning. The elaborate cross patterns make
reference to the interior church space and liturgical
movements contained therein. The scalloped decoration
that delineates the top edge of each of the festal scenes
reaffirms such a symbolic connotation by abstractly
representing the domes that characteristically towered
above contemporary Russian churches.
The depicted saints’ ecclesiastical identity also
pointed to Moscow’s direct apostolic inheritance to
protect and nurture the Christian faith. Just as military
saints surrounding a Byzantine icon of the Mother of
God emphasized the intimate connection she maintained
with the empire’s military campaigns, the bishop saints
surrounding her image in the Russian context make
explicit her direct connection to the leaders of the
church, past and present.27 As the Eucharistic liturgy
was regularly reenacted in the presence of this icon, the
priests drew their authority from the figures depicted
upon the icon. Apostolic authority had been passed
on through the hands of the depicted bishops to their
successors by means of ordination.28 Robert Taft, a
preeminent scholar of Byzantine liturgics, notes that
the Church Fathers depicted (typically bowing down) in
25. Peter is well known for moving the Metropolitan’s seat to
Moscow from Vladimir; Alexei served as ambassador to the ruling
Mongols and played a leading role during the minority of Dmitrii
Donskoi (1359–1389), the first Muscovite prince to pose a serious
challenge to Mongol rule since the thirteenth-century invasion. See
R. O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613 (London and
New York: Longman, 1987), pp. 117–118; L. Nersesjan, The Splendour
of Creation: The Icons of Dionisij (Milan: R. C. Edizioni, 1998), pp. 5,
10; and N. V. Riasanovsky and M. D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, 7th
ed. (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 91–92.
26. See Lidov, “Hierotopy” (note 3), p. 46.
27. For a discussion of an icon of the Mother of God surrounded by
military saints, see Pentcheva (note 11), pp. 94–97.
28. This contrasted with the Latin Church’s notion of apostolic
succession through the papal office. Such a contrast is particularly
significant at this moment when Moscow was increasingly responding
to political and heretical forces related to the Catholic Church. In the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lithuania and Poland held control
182 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
an Orthodox church’s apse are actively concelebrating
the liturgy with the priest at the altar.29 Given that the
“1514” Vladimirskaia was located upon the ambo of the
Dormition Cathedral,30 we might read its bordering saints
as participating along with the performance of liturgical
activities which took place upon the ambo. The postures
of the icon’s bordering saints, many of whom are holding
books, could easily be interpreted as sharing in the
reading of Scripture, delivery of sermons, and leading
of hymns.31
We also should not ignore the fact that these figures
encircle the Mother of God on this icon. Framing is
never inconsequential, and in this case, the bordering
ecclesiastics represent the mediation of Mary’s holiness
through church leaders to the body of the faithful.32
These figures also seem to guard her, just as saints were
known to stand guard at the border of the Heavenly
Jerusalem.33 Additionally, as a replica (at least in part)
of the Tretiakov icon’s precious metal revetment, it
serves as a painted citation of the valuable applied art
objects, which decorated most contemporary miracle-
working icons.34 Icon decorations in general could be
quite elaborate, comprising not only frames, but also
metalwork and jewels attached to the icons’ surfaces,
over Kiev and the southern and western lands of former Rus’. As
bordering nations with powerful militaries, they represented serious
political opposition to the rise of the Muscovite state, but as Catholic
countries they also represented the encroachment of religious heresy
upon Russian territories. Over the course of the fifteenth century,
Lithuania effectively severed its Orthodox populace from the control
of Moscow by successfully installing a separate metropolis in Kyiv to
control the archbishoprics in its domain. At the close of the sixteenth
century, this subsection of the Orthodox Church would accept the
authority of the pope in the Union of Brest. B. A. Gudziak, Crisis and
Reform: The Kyivan Metropolinate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople,
and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, Mass.: Ukrainian
Research Institute, Harvard University, 1998).
29. R. F. Taft, Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines
Saw It (Berkeley, CA: InterOrthodox Press, 2006), pp. 150–153.
30. Russkaia Istoricheskaia Biblioteka (Saint Petersburg, 1876), vol.
3, pp. 309–310, 422.
31. H. Faensen and V. Ivanov, Early Russian Architecture, trans.
Mary Whittall (London: Paul Elek, 1975), p. 512.
32. As Glen Peers argues: “Frames, or simply edges, margins,
transitional spaces generally, were sites of interpretation and
complementary signifying. [. . .] The edges of Byzantine art were not
only places where multiple interpretations were provided; they were
also where the reality of an image was declared, where its emergence
and existence as a quasi-animate entity took place.” G. Peers, Sacred
Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 5–6.
33. Lidov, “The Sacred Space” (see note 3), p. 18.
34. Much recent Russian literature examines such decorations
added to icons as pious donations. I. A. Sterligova, “O znachenii
the aforementioned podea, and even veils, all of which
obscured the icon’s painting, in some cases almost
completely. As such, the framing and decoration of an
icon functioned in a manner analogous to the iconostasis
by shielding the most holy space of the icon (or church)
from the view of all but a few select clergy.
Architectural and liturgical contexts
Turning to the architectural context of the “1514”
Vladimirskaia, it is important to understand just where
the ambo was located spatially within the church edifice,
since this was the location upon which the “1514” icon
was placed. According to the sixth-century poet Paul
the Silentiary, in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, a
raised, half-walled passageway connected the ambo in
the middle of the nave to the solea, the raised platform,
which ran along the chancel barrier, a precursor to the
iconostasis.35 However, by the fifteenth century, when
the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow was built, the ambo
had retreated to occupy the center portion of the solea.36
This was the area directly in front of the iconostasis’s
Royal Doors, and also the location at which the faithful
received communion. Hence, the “1514” Vladimirskaia
was situated in front of the iconostasis in one of the most
significant places along its local, lowest tier. On the
other hand, the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia was situated next
to the altar, and therefore behind the iconostasis.37
The “1514” icon served as a portal to the sacred space
of the sanctuary—a function of the entire iconostasis,
in fact. However, unlike the iconostasis in general, this
individual icon gave access to a very specific object
within the sanctuary. In other words, while the entire
iconostasis served as a signifier to infinite signifieds
within the holy domain, the “1514” icon gives special
priority to one particular signified. Moreover, the
Tretiakov Vladimirskaia not only held great significance
for the Russian land through her miracles, but she
also gazed upon the altar in which the most important
monarchical documents of the land were kept, and
dragotsennogo ubora v pochitanii sviatykh ikon,” in Chudotvornaia
Ikona (see note 13); and “Dragotsennyi ubor russkikh ikon XIV–XV vv.,”
in Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo: Sergii Radonezhskii i khudozhestvennaia
kul’tura Moskvy XIV-XV vv. (Saint Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1998),
pp. 217–228. See also Lidov, “Miracle-Working” (see note 23), p. 53; L.
A. Shchennikova, “The Miracle-Working Icons of the Moscow Kremlin”
in Christian Relics (see note 3), pp. 236–237.
35. Paul the Silentiary, “Description of the Ambo,” in Description of
Hagia Sophia, lines 221–224, see Taft (see note 29), pp. 78–79.
36. Faensen and Ivanov (see note 31), p. 512.
37. Bogomater’ Vladimirskaia (see note 13), p. 11.
 Gasper-Hulvat: The icon as performer and as performative utterance
where, with each rite of consecration, the crucifixion
of Mary’s child was reenacted through performative
utterance.38
During the Little and Great Entrances (moments of
the liturgy when the Royal Doors were opened), the
congregation might also see the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia
next to the altar.39 It was only at such high points in
the regular liturgy, upon the four annual feast days
dedicated to the Vladimirskaia, and during Holy
Week when the doors remained continuously open,
that anyone other than the most eminent ecclesiastics
could visually encounter the twelfth-century icon.
The iconostasis constituted a barrier, but one that was
permeable. It provided the officiants with bodily access
to the sanctuary, and the faithful with visual access both
through the Royal Door openings and through the icons
placed upon it.
Considering the iconostasis’s function as barrier begs
the question of just what this wall concealed and for
what purpose. In his discussion of the theology of the
iconostasis, Nicholas Constas draws upon fifteenth-
century religious thinker Symeon of Thessalonike’s
comparison of the icon screen to the veil of the
tabernacle in the Hebrew Scriptures. Constas argues that
a veil of one sort or another—and even multiple layers of
veils—are in fact the only means by which humankind
can encounter the holy. Orthodox theology, particularly
that of icons, emphasizes the perception of the divine as
light. But the light of the divine is intensely blinding;
that which enables sight also prevents vision when it
exceeds the viewer’s capacity to behold it. “Veils,” a
figurative term designating symbols in general, enable
human perception of the divine. The iconostasis does
not conceal the sacred from the body of the faithful,
but rather reveals the sacred through a veil most
appropriate to the viewers’ faculties of vision. It
constitutes one of an infinite progression of veils that
drape the holy of holies.40
In light of this discussion of veils, we might consider
how the “1514” icon functioned as a veil as well. As a
38. Tolstaya (see note 18), p. 15.
39. The term “Little Entrance” marks the liturgical moment when
the Gospels are brought out amid the congregation and through the
Royal Doors into the sanctuary. The Great Entrance occurs when the
unconsecrated offerings are brought to the altar. See Faensen and
Ivanov (note 31), p. 48.
40. N. P. Constas, “Symeon of Thessalonike and the Theology of the
Icon Screen,” in Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical,
Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and
West, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks,
2006), pp. 163–183.
183
copy of the miracle-working Tretiakov Vladimirskaia, the
“1514” icon mediated the intense holiness of the object
placed next to the altar. It granted access to this sacred
object in a manner that marked the more ancient icon
as more sacred, just as the iconostasis itself marks the
sanctuary space as more sacred. Furthermore, the frame
of the “1514” icon acts as a sort of veil to the internal,
venerated image, just as other icon decorations served
as veils, both literally and figuratively, to the holiness of
their respective icons.
As the border between nave and sanctuary, the
iconostasis exists as a liminal entity between visibility
and invisibility, not unlike the body of Mary herself,
whose flesh contained the invisible spirit in visible
form.41 But the division within the church structure is
of one sacred space separated from another sacred
space; it is somewhat confusing why these two spaces,
both sacred, are so different that they should be so
emphatically divided from one another. Uspensky
engages the complex semiotics of this division in
a recent article examining a seventeenth-century
controversy that concerned opposing liturgical
movements within and outside of the altar space. He
arrives at the conclusion that there was an elaborate
system of analogous spaces and features within the
church structure. The Royal Doors of the iconostasis
and the doors leading into the church itself, along with
the icons surrounding both, “are as if doubles of one
another.” The space behind the iconostasis and the upper
tiers of the iconostasis can be understood as the space
for turning to Christ, whereas the space in front of the
iconostasis, including its lowest tier and the solea, can
be understood as the space for following after Christ.42
For the “1514” Vladimirskaia and its twelfth-century
counterpart, Uspensky’s distinction dramatically clarifies
the unique functions of copy and prototype. We can
understand the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia as turning directly
to Christ, simultaneously at the altar and in heaven,
and using her intercessory powers to protect Moscow
and its leaders. The “1514” icon allowed the public
to gain access to the Vladimirskaia, while at the same
time keeping her in the geographic space of the church
as close as possible to the body of Christ, as it came
into existence upon the altar in each consecration. The
“1514” icon followed after both Christ and the altar-
dwelling prototype by repeating with precision the
41. Ibid., p. 175.
42. See Uspensky (note 4).
184 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010
prototype’s features and receiving petitions in the stead
of the miracle-working object. Like the doors, the two
icons are “as if doubles of one another,” but instead
of being located at the entry to each space, where the
spatial journey begins, the two icons are each located
at the respective goals or culmination points of the
journeys. The Tretiakov Vladimirskaia resides at the place
of the consecration of the sacrament, which is the goal of
the priestly journey; the “1514” Vladimirskaia resides at
the place of the reception of the sacrament, which is the
goal of the communicant’s journey.
As previously mentioned, Uspensky compares
the lowest tier of the iconostasis and the solea with
a theatrical proscenium. Although there are inherent
problems with this comparison,43 the practices of
concealment and revelation inherent to the proscenium
evoke theoretical concerns related to the liturgical
space and the role of its icons. As phenomenologist
Edward Casey notes, the distinct difference in perception
between here and there is predicated upon the bodily
experience of the observer.44 However, in the theatrical
and ecclesiastical contexts, this distinction is somewhat
blurred: An audience member, or churchgoer, in
a successful act of theater or church attendance,
experiences a state of being elsewhere, or at least of only
partially being here. Performance theorist Gay McAuley
notes that in theater, the elsewhere becomes materially
at hand, yet there is a pervasive oscillation between the
elsewhere, to which we are taken by the actors on stage,
and our bodily experience sitting in the theater seat.45
In the liturgical setting, the worshipper experiences the
continual vacillation between being overcome by the
eternal sacred presence that pervades the church and
the sensation of dwelling within a fragile and temporal
human body. Hidden from view from the worshipper are
not just the wings of the stage, or the altar space behind
the iconostasis, but the divine itself, in all its ineffability.
43. The proscenium is a device inherently imbued with the
ideologies of humanist individualism, imperialism, and colonialism.
It prioritizes one ideal vantage point; gradually degraded vantage
points radiate out from it. A relic of Western European paradigms far
removed from the Eastern ideologies that shaped the iconostasis, the
proscenium is designed primarily as a frame surrounding the object of
vision, whereas the iconostasis is an entity beholden to sight in itself
and also permeable to vision. R. Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre
(Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 63–64.
44. E. S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed
Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1993), p. 51.
45. G. McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the
Theatre (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 86.
In terms of the two Vladimirskaia icons, we can
understand the “1514” copy as existing in the realm of
the embraceable “here” while providing access to the
“not-here” of the twelfth-century icon. It is this access
that raises the same sense of ambivalent oscillation;
while the two objects remain distinct, they also exist
together as one and the same. When the not-here is the
same as the here, the worshipper achieves the optimal
outcome of the worship experience by fully entering into
the space of the sacred in mind and body.46 The
imaginary worlds existing beyond the boundaries of the
proscenium in the theatrical production correspond to
the infinite expanses of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the
liturgical context. Always immune to the gaze, such
spaces exist nevertheless for full participants in the
dramatic performance. And as Isar argues, the goal of
the believer is never the achievement of sight of these
invisible spaces, but rather the tension and movement in
the spiritual attempt to see more fully.47 For the
communicant attending a worship service at the
Moscow Dormition Cathedral, the aim was not to enter
the altar area physically in order to more closely gaze
upon the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia, but rather that the
“1514” Vladimirskaia became the Tretiakov
Vladimirskaia, as here and there, or me and not-me,
became a unified whole.
Nevertheless, the other, the not-me, persists both in
the form of the invisible and the visible. The twelfth-
century icon and the sixteenth-century icon remain
distinct objects to apprehend, to behold, to comprehend.
Indeed, how these two objects were comprehended
cannot be isolated from the element of duplication,
for they remain distinct from one another and from
the bodies of their viewers. As performativity theorist
Rebecca Schneider discusses, the faculty of sight
itself enables comprehension only when it is a matter
46. One could cite numerous Byzantine mystics’ visions that make
this optimization of the worship experience concrete. For example,
Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) experienced an event
whereby, “suddenly there shown upon him in great profusion a divine
illumination. [. . .] Thereupon the young man was no longer aware of
himself. He could not remember whether he was in a house or even
under a roof at all. [. . .] Even if his feet were on the ground he was
not aware of it [. . .] he forgot the entire world and was altogether
present in that immaterial light, and was even himself, or so it seemed
to him, become light.” The not-here (the divine light) engulfs the
here, and even the self. Symeon, Catechesis 22.92–99, quoted in A.
Louth, “Light, Vision and Religious Experience in Byzantium,” in The
Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 96–97.
47. Isar, “The vision” (see note 5).
 Gasper-Hulvat: The icon as performer and as performative utterance 185

of seeing again. Comprehensibility is a function of assert spiritual and political authority over the country as
narration, of the comprehended sight being replicated a whole. The historical and liturgical contexts of this icon
and framed.48 It is in a visual image’s repetition, in the converge as the “1514” icon transports its venerator not
selection of what to repeat and the story in which it is simply to the Tretiakov prototype, but moreover to her
repeated, that meaning is ascribed to the image itself. It position within the spatial organization of the church,
is not in the image where we find or are given meaning, next to the altar. Both the icon and the altar transcend
but in its duplication in context. the earthly plane in their immediate connection to
The Tretiakov Vladimirskaia was known to protect the Heavenly Jerusalem, but also, both connect to the
its city of residence because of the stories told about ascendance of the Muscovite state through the miracles
it. Such narratives participated in the creation of the of the Vladimirskaia and the documents granting
miracle-working icon as the palladium of the Russian rule to Muscovy that were contained within the altar
land, and the “1514” icon, with the repetitions it put space. The repetition of an object with a rich history of
forth, stands as a performative utterance in this program, performance—as a performer of miracles, as a performer
inscribing meaning onto the seen and unseen images of within liturgical rites and processions, and as a
the Vladimirskaia. The “1514” Vladimirskaia educated its performative subject and object—allowed for a nuanced
viewer as to why the same image’s earlier iterations were and effective performative utterance to be delivered by
significant and how they were meaningful. The “1514” means of the “1514” Vladimirskaia icon. It secured its
Vladimirskaia illustrated the teleological progression meaning backwards through the previous iterations of
of power to Moscow and of time towards the Last the same images and would sustain powerful meaning
Judgment. It implicated the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia in for future iterations.
these progressions, assigning purpose and meaning to
the miracle-working object through the paradigm of
Moscow as Third Rome and heir to Constantinople.
Its creation and display significantly transformed the
meaning of the Tretiakov Vladimirskaia in ways that
were exceedingly evocative for Muscovy’s political
transformation into Russia’s leading city.
The “1514” Vladimirskaia was the product of a ruling
hierarchy seeking to firmly establish itself in political
and ecclesiastical power structures by means of the
legacy of Russian and Christian history. The doing of
history—the act of making the story of the past through
the objects and events of the present—can itself be read
as performative.49 By securing the meaning and memory
of the past through the ritualized repetition of stories and
symbols related to their rise to power, Muscovite rulers
created the normative narrative that became the still-
repeated story of Russian history. For it is not in the lived
experience of historical events that meaning is found, it
is in the narration of events past that meaning is created.
Through the “1514” Vladimirskaia, we can see how
Moscow’s ruling elite successfully claimed ownership
of Russia’s past—in effect, created this past—in order to

48. R. Schneider, “Never, Again,” in The Sage Handbook of

Performance Studies (see note 2), pp. 25–26.
49. Schneider writes that, “To read ‘history’ as a set of sedimented
acts which are not the historical acts themselves but the act of securing
any incident backward—the repeated act of securing memory—is
to rethink the site of history in ritual repetition.” R. Schneider,
“Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001):105.