It would be a mistake to suppose that all these erections of icons, and iconostases, these tiers of icons, fixed icons, and groups of icons apparent throughout ancient Russian churches are merely decorative furnishing. On the contrary, as opposed to the true wall-paintings, all these tiers and groups received a definite spiritual meaning. To this day, as the pious worshipper goes round before service to venerate the various icons (called poklónnÿya because people bend the knee before them: poklón is a deep bow), they are, as it were, making a pilgrimage round what early Christianity would have termed the holy memoriae of their church.

      With the development of the tall iconostas, Russian icon-painting came to devote special attention to the Royal Doors in the centre and to the side doors in the screen which lead to the Credence and the Sacristy (prothesis and diaconicon): these doors are either decorated with wood-carving or covered with icons. The Royal Doors (the name goes back to Byzantine usage[33]) had, at first, only room upon their panels for the Four Evangelists, but when they grew higher the Annunciation was added above, Gabriel on one side, and the B.V.M. on the other. From the tenth to the fourteenth centuries in both Greece and Russia this was represented upon two pillars in the sanctuary rising above the iconostas. Next, for the sake of decorative effect, they began to hang the Royal Doors upon special door-posts to support them and to set a canopy or tabernacle over them after the fashion of a kiot[34] or icon-shrine. It became the custom to paint upon the three surfaces of the posts series of holy Bishops and Deacons, beginning with Stephen, the first Deacon, complete with their censers and incense boxes. On the canopy was painted either the Eucharist[35] or the Old Testament Trinity;[36] later, under western influence, the Last Supper, the Vernicle, or Picture Not Made with Hands, Our Lady of the Sign (Známenie),[37] Sophia the Wisdom of God, and others. More varied and interesting were the subjects painted upon the northern and southern doors: the Archangel Michael, the Guardian Angel, the Prophet Daniel, the Creation of Adam, the Expulsion from Paradise, Jacob’s Ladder, Abraham’s Bosom, and many other subjects.

      These are all edifying themes and their teaching was clear to the uneducated Christian. They were symbols telling of the doors of paradise, shut against the sinner, guarded by the Archangel with the flaming sword, but open to the soul of the just, purged from original sin and granted access to heaven.

      From the sixteenth century we observe a multiplication of icons in the churches, in domestic oratories (called also obraznáya, a room set apart for obrazá – icons), in monasteries, cells and chapels, and further in the living-rooms and offices of houses, and also above entrance gates and doors. A special class of icons is that of birth-icons, which are given to children at their birth, and coffin or funerary icons given to a church and preserved in a person’s memory. The icons of the Moscow Tsars fall into this category and still kept in special cupboards along the walls of the Archangel Cathedral in the Kremlin at Moscow, the burial place of the old Tsars. Specially honoured icons were protected from incense smoke and dust by curtains of light silk: in houses curtains veiled them against the doings of everyday life. The popularity of particular subjects was influenced by their use on different occasions of life, icons of the Christ and of The Virgin for the nuptial blessing, Christ above gates, and the Deesis above the entrance of the older churches. The multiplication of icons was broadly connected with the custom of having in every house an oratory, generally several glazed kiots filled with icons and set in the so-called ‘fair corner’ (krásny úgol) of a reception or a dining-room. Wealthier people would have a separate room for the oratory and in it the icons would be arranged in regular tiers with shelves for lamps to burn before them.

      Mounting and external adornment of icons which, side by side with excellence of painting, was the subject of pious zeal on the part of donors. Even the Greeks, as early as the tenth century, yielding to the general taste for ornamental backgrounds, began adorning the whole field of the icons with stamped sheets of silver and the raised borders or true frames with similar strips of silver, which were sometimes set with jewels. The golden nimbus of early times from being flat was given relief as a halo (vênchik) adorned with repoussé or with filigree of twisted gold wire (skan) sometimes picked out with enamel (finíff); later the halo took the form of an actual crown. For example, the golden diadem discovered at Kiev[38] where it had been buried for safety at the time of the Mongol invasion, with its tiny enamel representation of the Deesis, and figures of Archangels and Apostles, is similar to the halo from a large icon but has the shape of a diadem. The zeal of donors did not stop short at these directly symbolic adornments; they began to decorate icons with silver-gilt pendants, likewise in the symbolic form of crescents (the word in Russian is hanging tsáta) and to the haloes they began to add earrings and strings of pearls or beads.

      As long ago as the fourteenth century, under Greek influence, the Russians began to cover even the figures with plates of silver showing in more or less relief the outlines and folds of the clothes and vestments. Such a plate is called à ríza, properly speaking a garment, especially a chasuble[39]; they were first applied to the large ‘fixed’ icons and afterwards to those which individuals received at baptism or on special occasions. The parts of the figures left unclothed, faces, hands, and the like, all the flesh tints, show through holes in the riza. This is how Paul of Aleppo describes the look of the icons in the Uspenski Cathedral at Moscow: ‘All round the church and about the four piers are set great icons of which you can see nothing but the hands and faces, hardly any of the clothing can be distinguished [i.e. the painting], the rest is thick repoussé silver with niello. The greater parts of the icons are Greek.’ Paul did not distinguish between true Greek icons and copies going back to Greek originals.

      Naturally even more decoration was applied to the devotional icon in private hands: this came to stand not merely as a symbol or sign, but a kind of household protector and defender; against evil spirits and the invasion of the Devil, icons of the Martyr S. Nicetas, the vanquisher of evil spirits; against fiery conflagration, the figure of Elias the Prophet or his Ascent in a Fiery Chariot or else of Our Lady the Burning Bush; against murrain among cattle, the icon of S. Blaise (Vlási); from sickness, S. Panteleimon; from sudden death, S. Christopher.

      Under Peter the Great the Russian bishops were carried away by his movement for reform and enlightenment in the direction of Protestantism and a purging of faith and ritual and gave the clergy directions to clear the icons of unnecessary ‘additions’. The result was a general reduction of ancient objects in churches, especially of icons valuable for their antiquity or for their mountings. Pearls taken off icons are (or were) shown by the bushel