I.P. Sakharov and N.S. Leskov at the origins of the artistic and aesthetic understanding of Russian icon painting

The article was written in the field of topical interdisciplinary research at the intersection of art history and literary studies. For the first time, a comparative analysis of the views by the paleographer I. P. Sakharov and the writer N. S. Leskov on the problem of icon painting in the 19th century was presented. The material was the work “Research on Russian Icon Painting” (1849), the article “On Russian Icon Painting” (1873) and the short story “The Sealed Angel” (1873). Sakharov’s “Research.” was not the subject of a detailed study by art historians, which may be due both to the ambiguous assessment of his activities in general, and to the fact that he was not a specialist in the field of art history and ethnography. The analysis revealed that his work, being the first major one devoted to the icon painting, not only summarized previous experience, but also contained provisions that led to new discoveries, it was practically focused on the preservation of the Russian icon painting. Sakharov developed an icon painter’s analytical and synthetic approach to working with podlinnik, and for the first time characterized the icon painting podlinnik. The icon is presented in his work as a religious object with its own artistic and aesthetic system, which is different from painting. Leskov, being as much an amateur as Sakharov, and possessing artistic intuition, also emphasized the inherent value of the Old Russian icon painting, historically closely related to the Byzantine one. Similarities and intersections were found in the views of the writer and the paleographer, it was established that Leskov relied on Sakharov’s podlinnik and used his analytical and synthetic approach during the creation of the short story “The Sealed Angel”. For the first time, it is noted that in the works of both Sakharov and Leskov there is the beginning of an artistic and aesthetic understanding of the icon, which is uncharacteristic of the studies of the 19th century (F. I. Buslaev, D. A. Rovinsky, etc.) and will be developed only in the works of philosophers and theologians of 20th century (E. N. Trubetskoy, P. A. Florensky and others).