In memory of André Guillou
∵
In the preface to his 1966 book on the Kariye Camii, Paul A. Underwood refers to Theodor Schmitt’s book, published by the Russian Archaeological Institute of Constantinople (RAIC) in 1906, as “the only previous work that deals systematically with the Kariye Camii, its history, its architecture, and the mosaics as they were to be seen at the time.”1 The Ukrainian artist Dimitri Ismailovitch’s (1890, Satanov, Russian Empire -1976, Rio de Janeiro) copies of the mosaics and frescoes of the Kariye Camii, produced in the mid-1920s but not known until the last decade of the 20th century,2 have opened a new chapter in this historiography: not only do they demonstrate continuity between the activities of the Byzantine Institute of America and those of the RAIC, they also make clear the immense contribution of émigrés from the Russian Empire in Constantinople to the history of Byzantine studies. Subsequent research on the establishment of the Byzantine Institute of America, including the role of Thomas Whittemore, has only added weight to this idea.3
In the 1990s, the copies Ismailovitch had executed at the Kariye Camii were the only known portion of his artistic output. Study of the artist’s archive, along with works representative of his larger creative career (kept in the Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti Collection in Rio de Janeiro), allows us to consider the reception of the copies, both at the moment of their creation and their rediscovery, and raises the question of the attitude of Istanbul artists to their Byzantine heritage.
Ismailovitch was in Constantinople in 1919, and in the winter of 1919–20 he got to know the artist Alexis Gritchenko. In his book Two Years in Constantinople (1930; published in French), Gritchenko describes how Ismailovitch approached him while he was drawing and how, from there, they became friends. He relays that Ismailovitch gave up his job at a second-hand clothing shop to become an artist: “He was passionate about art, about Istanbul, and about Byzantine walls.”4 In fact, Ismailovitch had studied painting as a child, and in Kiev, where he lived at the time of the revolution, he had been accepted to the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and had begun exhibiting his work. But of course, he was only a novice compared to Gritchenko, who had first-hand knowledge of French modernism and had been an active participant in the heady artistic life of Moscow in the second half of the 1910s. Gritchenko was also a recognized expert on icons and the author of several books, among them On the Relationship of Russian Painting to Byzantium and the West in the 13th-20th Centuries (1913) and The Russian Icon as an Art of Painting (1917), both published in Russian.5
A teacher-student relationship developed between the two artists. In his French book, Gritchenko talks about how they would sketch the city together; they discussed each other’s work as well as art more generally, with particular interest in facture.6 They would meet with fellow Istanbul artists and with writers and intellectuals, including the painters Ibrahim Çalli and Namyk Bey and the poet Ruşen Eşref.
However, these two friends had fundamentally differing attitudes towards their stay in Constantinople. Gritchenko dreamed of a swift departure for Paris, while Ismailovitch, an active founder of the Union of Russian Painters in Constantinople (1922–23), was hugely enthusiastic about becoming a part of the city’s artistic life.7 Gritchenko turned down Ismailovitch’s offer to teach at the Union’s studio and to exhibit his Constantinople watercolours there.8 Although Gritchenko continued to sell these paintings when the opportunity arose, he wanted to keep the core collection for display in Paris: they were to be his calling card in that new artistic environment, in which the Ukrainian artist sought to secure his rightful place.9
In March 1921, Gritchenko left for Greece and then France, while Ismailovitch stayed on in Istanbul, working energetically to put on the Union’s exhibitions, while also organizing in the city at least three solo exhibitions of his own work.10 In his role as ‘exhibition organizer’ he regularly interacted with supporters, including the American diplomats Foster Waterman Stearns and Gardiner Howland Shaw.11 Ismailovitch also made connections with local representatives from the art world, which remained intact even after the disbanding of the Union, and became a well-known figure.12
The artist exhibited in Istanbul within two main genres, namely, urban landscape and still life. Noting his evident love for the ‘Orient’, the local press singled out his still lifes in particular, works in which colour and light effects were combined with stunning technical skill to convey texture:
You completely forget that you are standing in front of a canvas and colours, and you feel the limpid transparency of glass, the softness of fabrics, of old Oriental carpets with rich colours.13
The critics all agreed that Ismailovitch’s still lifes – simple, ascetic, without superficial prettiness or contrived aestheticism – were serious works of technical excellence. The style of these pieces was sometimes defined as ‘idealistic realism’, i.e. between illusion and reality,14 but more often as a naturalism “on the border of sculpting in colour and planes, revealing in this young artist an extremely rare gift for embodying nature.”15
The distinctive qualities of Ismailovitch’s painterly skill, so vigorously displayed in his still lifes, were put to use in his reproduction of historical monuments: a genuine “spiritual exertion” for the artist.16 An episode from Ismailovitch’s early biography – recounted in his own words in an article published in the Parisian émigré magazine Renaissance to honour the 50th anniversary of his artistic journey – serves as a representative epigraph to his monument-focussed project. The artist recalls that during one of the battles of the First World War, in which he served at the headquarters for General Aleksei Brusilov’s army, he was
enthralled by an ancient Ukrainian church: “Whatever happens, say I am wounded or even killed,” he decided, “I will nevertheless make a drawing of this church!” Then his unit retreated, and when very soon after he found himself back in the same place, the church was no longer there.17
The function of painting to memorialize the artistic heritage of the past was one of the driving forces behind Ismailovitch’s output during his seven years in Constantinople. As Gritchenko’s successor, he took up the position of a connoisseur and defender of Byzantine cultural heritage. On the 7th of November 1922, the French-language newspaper in Istanbul, Journal d’Orient, published an article stating that the Russian artist had just found a Byzantine fresco, perfectly preserved in some of its parts, among the ruins of the small Kemankeş Mosque (also known as Odalar Camii or Odalar Mesjedi), which had burned down in the fire of 1919. Introducing himself to Halil Ethem Bey, Director of the Imperial Ottoman Museum, Ismailovitch told him about his discovery and begged him to take action to preserve this fresco, which remained exposed to the open air and at the mercy of the elements. Bey thanked the Russian artist for his communication and promised to take the necessary measures.18
This episode illustrates perfectly how Ismailovitch acted on his own initiative, with vigour and determination, to make museum professionals and the urban community aware of the urgent need to preserve the valuable frescoes, which the artist discovered more than ten years before the excavations by the Swiss archaeologist Paul Schazmann (1934/35). However, the turning point, as Ismailovitch himself confirmed, was the commission – which he received from Gardiner Howland Shaw – to produce copies of one of the Byzantine mosaics at the Kariye Camii. Much later, when the artist was based in Rio de Janeiro, he wrote to Jean-Gabriel Lemoine, the director of what is today the Museum of Fine Arts Bordeaux, admitting:
This commission pointed me in the direction of Byzantine art, a subject on which I had previously gained an understanding with the extremely valuable guidance imparted to me by the painter Gritchenko.
Once I had plunged into the study of Byzantine art, I decided to make a complete survey of the frescoes in the Kariye Camii chapel, as well as of other mosaics.
It is important to note that the Imperial Russian Archaeological Institute had initiated a series of works in the survey, the first part of which had been published. These works were halted in 1912.
This gave me the idea of continuing these works at my own risk. Thus, the works presented in my collection – which were made over a period of three years – form a definitive conclusion to the works of the Russian Archaeological Institute and will enable the publication of a second and final volume dedicated to the Kariye Camii.19
Here, it is no accident that Ismailovitch positions himself as the successor to the RAIC, which had closed at the very start of the First World War. In the early 1920s, resuming its activities was on the agenda, and in 1924 the Soviet scholars Mikhail Alpatov and Nikolay Brunov were sent to Constantinople with the task of “familiarizing themselves with the situation of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, the destiny of which was an issue of keen interest for all academic institutions.”20 Although we have no direct evidence that they met with Ismailovitch, it is more than likely that they did. In the numerous reports on their mission, published in various journals, Alpatov and Brunov noted the catastrophic state of the Byzantine monuments, in particular the Kariye Camii as well as another monument with copying from which the artist was involved, the Odalar Camii. They tried to persuade the international academic community to unite around preservation efforts and to undertake a systematic study of the sites. In the summer of 1926, Ismailovitch met the scholar Victor Lazarev, who took an exceptional interest in his work in the Kariye Camii. A dialogue ensued, as evidenced by a letter from Lazarev – which has survived in Ismailovitch’s personal archive – dated 22 November 1926 and bearing the stamp of the “Museum of Fine Arts, Volkhonka, 12, Moscow, USSR”:
Dear Dimitri Vasilievich!
I am sending 12 photographs of Byzantine and Italian icons along with this letter. Since, with the exception of Our Lady of Vladimir, none of this material has yet been published, I beg you not to reproduce it anywhere in print.
I am very satisfied with the copy of the composition featuring the angel. In terms of definition of the form, it is undoubtedly a significant step forward in your research. I look forward to seeing the promised photographs of the original Kariye Camii frescoes and the Fethiye Camii mosaic, as well as the restored icon. When you leave for America, please let me know your new address – I would hate to lose contact with you.
In the near future I will let you know the names of the saints that you are interested in from the frescoes you have copied.
In the meantime, I shake you warmly by the hand, sincerely yours,
V. Lazarev.21
Related documents preserved in Lazarev’s archives attest that the artist replied to the scholar after he had moved to Brazil. Among these materials is a photograph of Ismailovitch in front of his copy of the Virgin of the Deesis (Fig. 7.1).
Dimitri Ismailovitch in front of his copy of the Virgin of the Deesis mosaic located in the esonarthex of Chora Church/Kariye Camii, Istanbul, 1926
Photo: Moscow, Archives Viktor Lazarev, repr. in Gerold Vzdornov, “Russkie khudozhniki i vizantijskoe iskusstvo v Konstantinopole” [Russian Artists and Byzantine Art in Constantinople], Tvorchestvo [Creation] (1992), p. 33
Also kept in the archive is a catalogue of an exhibition of Ismailovitch’s copies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with a dedicatory signature dated 15 December 1928, as well as the manuscript of a report titled “On the Mosaics and Frescoes of Kariye Camii and the State of Conservation of Other Monuments of Byzantine Antiquity in Constantinople.” A note at the end of the report reads “Constantinople, 1 March 1927,” indicating that Ismailovitch wrote it on the very eve of his departure from Constantinople.
On 2 March, the artist and his wife left the city on the steamboat Famaka. En route to Washington, D.C., they stopped in Athens, where Ismailovitch had a short exhibition in rooms at the Hotel ‘Splendid’, by invitation of the Greek government. The report was to be presented by the artist while on his American tour. One can assume that various copies of it existed; the final part of the one that is preserved in Lazarev’s archive is written on the official letterhead of the steamboat (“On board S. S. Vestris”) by which Ismailovitch and his wife travelled from New York to Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1927.
American diplomats organized exhibitions of Ismailovitch’s work in the United States, namely, at the Gordon Dunthorne Gallery, in Washington, D.C., and at the Brooklyn Museum. While in Istanbul, Ismailovitch had not only made contact with the aforementioned Gardiner Howland Shaw but also with Thomas Whittemore, who followed the progress of his work on the Kariye Camii copies with great interest. The concluding, and clearly the most intensive, stage of the work, executed in the summer and autumn of 1926, is documented in letters from the artist to Whittemore from August and December of that year, to which he attached photographs of the copies (nine in August and ten in December).22
In the report, Ismailovitch sums up his more than two years of work on the copies at the Kariye Camii (Figs. 7.2, 7.3).
Dimitri Ismailovitch, St Demetrius, copy of the fresco in Chora Church/Kariye Camii, Istanbul, oil on canvas mounted on cardboard by the artist, c.1926
Collection of Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro
Dimitri Ismailovitch, Isaiah’s Prophecy: The Angel Drives the Assyrians from Jerusalem, copy of the fresco in Chora Church/Kariye Camii, Istanbul, oil on canvas mounted on cardboard by the artist, c.1926
Collection of Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro
He describes how he was able to put together a “Byzantine mosaicist’s palette,” composed of 36 colours, using pebbles gathered from the corridors and eaves of the mosque. His examination of the mosaics also allowed him to elaborate his theory as to why the mosaics of the outer narthex, which are not very high up, appeared paler than those of the inner narthex, positioned almost a metre higher. This difference, he argued, was due to the fact that the conversion of the church into a mosque at the end of the 15th century had been carried out in haste and fairly superficially, such that many of the compositions located in less accessible regions of the space remained intact, while the most visible lower areas of the mosaics were completely plastered over, becoming paler as a result.
In the final part of the report, Ismailovitch gives a general description of the derelict and insufficiently preserved state of Byzantine monuments. Noting the indifference of the Ministry of Awqaf, under whose jurisdiction the mosques had been placed, as well as the insufficient financial resources of the Museum of Antiquities, which was responsible for their preservation, he argues that the question of the preservation of Byzantine monuments should be raised “as a matter of urgency for international artistic and archaeological organizations.” He considered his report to be a call to mobilize public opinion among the international community.
Ismailovitch’s exhibitions in Athens, Washington, and New York in 1927 were intended to have the same effect. The artist was then invited to Brazil, where in the summer of that year he was given an exhibition at the American embassy in Rio de Janeiro. From Brazil, the works were sent to London and shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1928. The subsequent fate of the copies is unknown up until 1948, when we hear of them in the French city of Bordeaux. There, Jean-Gabriel Lemoine had been appointed by the French government to offer an expert opinion on the Constantinople paintings before issuing a permit to take them out of France. Lemoine offered Ismailovitch the opportunity to exhibit them at the city’s Museum of Painting (now the Museum of Fine Arts Bordeaux) before they were to be sent to Brazil.23
In each of these exhibitions, the copies from the Kariye Camii were shown together with Ismailovitch’s cityscape sketches depicting a wide variety of Byzantine monuments in Constantinople: St Theodore (Kilissi Mesjedi), St Theodosia (now known as Gül Camii or the Rose Mosque), St Mary Panachrantos (Fenarî İsa Camii), and Hagia Sophia, as well as the Odalar Mesjedi, Tekfur Sarayı (the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus), and Bodrum Camii (known under the Greek name of Myrelaion).
The London exhibition, which was the most thematically rigorous, also featured the ‘palette of a Byzantine mosaicist’, an item whose subsequent fate remains unknown.24 Further exhibitions presented other works by Ismailovitch from the Constantinople period and assigned them a distinctive ethnographic-anthropological dimension, such as Journey to Constantinople, held in Bordeaux in October-November 1948. “We are presenting a voyage to Constantinople now, to the people of Bordeaux,” wrote the director of the Museum in the preface to the small catalogue of the exhibition.25 Along with Ismailovitch’s works, photographic enlargements of the mosaics at Hagia Sophia were exhibited, having been lent by the Byzantine Institute of America, or more specifically by the Byzantine Library in Paris. Among Ismailovitch’s works, in addition to the copies from the Kariye Camii, was a section dedicated to ‘Ethnography. Turkish and Russian Objects and Characters’. It included still lifes of everyday Turkish tableware, views of Constantinople with its Byzantine and Muslim monuments, and works under the general title ‘Ethnographic Studies’, including portraits of ethnic ‘characters’ who inhabited Istanbul: ‘Russian Artists’, ‘A Turk, an Arab’, ‘An Armenian, a Greek’, and so on (Fig. 7.4).
Dimitri Ismailovitch, Portrait of a Turk, oil on canvas glued on wood, 1920s
Collection of Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro
Based on responses to Ismailovitch’s work, Lemoine mounted another exhibition in Bordeaux, the title of which sounds like a kind of manifesto: The Wonders of Constantinople: Byzantine Light and Art. In the preface to the small catalogue booklet, the curator describes Constantinople as an Eastern city with cultural origins in ancient Persia. In tracing Byzantine and Arabic art to the remnants of ancient Persian civilization, he ‘forgot’, as was the custom at the time, about the cultural heritage that was specifically Turkish.26
Persian art, barely definable in more precise chronological or territorial terms than those employed by the French art historian, had also been one of the most important leitmotifs of Gritchenko’s book Two Years in Constantinople. There, the artist notes his first discovery of Persian miniatures in the Evkaf-ı Islamiye Museum (now the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum),27 to which he repeatedly returns, both on his own and accompanied by Turkish friends. With them, he discusses Eugène Delacroix and speculates about the influence of Persian art on Italian and Dutch visual cultures. He compares the Persian miniatures in the Museum with the mosaics in the Kariye Camii, “two exceptional places where the artist speaks to me in a revelatory language. They come from one source, Byzantium, and colour.”28
Gritchenko’s account of his visit with Ismailovitch to the home and studio of Namyk Bey29 is of particular interest. He is struck by the contrast between the orientally furnished hall in his house – decorated with Turkish and Persian folk art, “wonderful, in shades of orange pink, coated with varnish” – and Bey’s own portraits in the studio:
In Turkish life, one can see a series of Byzantine characteristics, because it has, in its time, been completely saturated with the Orient. In these works, I see a third-rate Europe, an ugly Hun lacking any point of contact with Byzantium, with its powerful art – nor with the Orient – with its particular way of life, its wisdom, aspirations towards nature and contemplation, that are inaccessible to Europe.30
The striking contrast between the powerful Oriental tradition that permeated the whole of Turkish life and the imitations of third-rate European artists in the works of contemporary Turkish art reminded Gritchenko of the situation in Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He attributes this similarity to the two cultures’ common position “between East and West.” Gritchenko told the artist Ibrahim Çalli:
Yes, you resemble us Russians. Like us, you were situated between the Orient and Occident. You inherited Byzantine culture in your own way. Arabs and Persians are for you what Asia is for us.31
This possibility of cross-cultural dialogue was obvious to Gritchenko’s Turkish friends, who replied: “Russians carry themselves quite differently from the Germans, the French, or the English. Your gestures, the way you sit, [all of it] is Oriental.”32
However, in this question of attitudes towards a Byzantine heritage, the notion of a common ‘position between East and West’ was fraught, even potentially explosive. For Western European cultures, Byzantium was the East and was perceived, albeit reductively, as a civilization foreign to the West. Henri Matisse could admire ‘Muslim art’ at the Munich exhibition of 1910 and, in much the same way, the Russian icons he saw in Moscow.33 In Orthodox countries, particularly in Greece and Russia, the question of icons and the Byzantine legacy was always emotionally charged, whereas in Turkey the attitude towards Byzantium was one of disacknowledgement.34 It is no coincidence that Çalli – the artist who was influenced more than anyone else by Gritchenko’s painting style – seems to have remained indifferent to the Byzantine subjects that figured in the work of his Ukrainian friend.35
The reaction of the Greek press to Ismailovitch’s exhibition in Athens is telling. The newspaper Eleutheron Vima wrote about it on 8 March 1927:
The works of Mr Ismailovitch constitute an extensive propaganda of Greek art and artistic concepts among the European and American world, and in this respect, we can only express our gratitude to the artist.36
And with more emphasis, the weekly magazine Kiriaki, reporting on 13 March the failure of negotiations for the sale of several works between the director of the National Gallery of Art, Zakharias Papandoníou, and the artist, noted: “Nonetheless, the copies of the Chora ought to remain here.”37
Ismailovitch’s reverence towards Byzantine antiquity was intrinsic: his creation of the Kariye Camii copies was, as he himself admitted to Lemoine, a continuation of the RAIC project initiated by the artist Nikolay Kluge, a few of whose sketches and drawings, along with several photographs, were published in the album appended to Schmitt’s 1906 volume.38 Ismailovitch’s inheritance of the work of the RAIC meant that his reproductions formed part of the Russian national archaeological tradition, an aspect amplified by the fact that, in spite of all his efforts, they had not been properly appreciated by local authorities and artists.39 The collaboration with Kluge was a vital part of the work of the RAIC, for his copies were much more precise than those that had been published in 1878 by the Viennese architect Domenico Pulgher.40 Pulgher was the first to take measurements and make drawings of the Byzantine monument after the plaster had been removed from them in the 1860s, at the order of Sultan Abdülaziz. His main interest was the architecture of the Kariye.
The first detailed analysis of the pictorial content of the mosaics, as Schmitt points out,41 was the work of one of the founders of the RAIC, Nikodim Kondakov. This famous Russian academic visited Chora Monastery in 1880 and, by the following year, had already published the initial results of his work in a slim pamphlet, sensing the urgency to re-ascribe the mosaics to a Byzantine master – contrary to the prevailing theory of the time, which attributed them to a student of Giotto in the tradition of Duccio.42 In the heat of this controversy, however, Kondakov overplayed his hand by arguing against dating the mosaics to the early 14th century, suggesting that the majority should be dated to the period from the 11th to the 13th centuries. For this, he was severely criticized by the French Byzantine scholars Gabriel Millet and Charles Diehl.43 This criticism has overshadowed the fundamental, genuinely groundbreaking significance of his pamphlet.44
In this brochure from 1881, Kondakov published line drawings of the mosaics. He had made these using photographic images commissioned from the photographer Berggruen by an Englishman; the only copy of these photographs that was not put on sale had been donated by the patron to the library of the Greek Philological Society, where Kondakov was able to make use of them.45 In 1884 Kondakov invited the watercolourist from Saint Petersburg, Emile Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, to work in Constantinople. A self-taught artist, he was influenced by the Italian-born Luigi Premazzi, the most important representative of the watercolour technique in 1870s Russia. The watercolour by Villiers that is reproduced in Kondakov’s second publication on the Kariye Camii (1886),46 as can be judged from its black-and-white reproduction, has a freer character than is typical of Orientalist vedute. Moreover, the painting’s emphasis contrasts with that of Kondakov’s line drawings, in which the interest of an iconographer is paramount.
Reference to black-and-white reproductions of the mosaics was considered problematic at the beginning of the 20th century, since although the mastery of colour displayed by Byzantine artists was most highly regarded, their drawing tended to be disparaged.47 Gritchenko, who looked at the mosaics and frescoes of Constantinople through the lens of the scholarly work of Diehl and Millet,48 as well as that of the most recent achievements of French and Russian avant-garde painting, was particularly sensitive to colour in Byzantine painting. His watercolours differ fundamentally from the genre of the archaeological copy, both the neoclassical type of the 19th century and the attempted precision of Kluge’s copies, as well as from the 19th-century orientalist veduta: they are free of specific details and complex compositions, being built up exclusively from a simplified colour dynamic (Fig. 7.5).
Alexis Gritchenko, Fragment of a Mosaic in the Kariye (Chora) Mosque, watercolour and pencil on paper, June 1920
Collection of Gizella Lopusanszky and Alexander Demko, New York
Ismailovitch’s Constantinople watercolours, though not as powerful in their approach to colour, show the same tendency (Figs. 7.6, 7.7).
Dimitri Ismailovitch, Untitled [Landscape of Constantinople], watercolour and pencil on paper, 1920s
Collection of Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro
Dimitri Ismailovitch, Untitled [Landscape of Constantinople], watercolour and pencil on paper, 1920s
Collection of Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro
The freedom of colour Gritchenko achieved through his contact with Byzantine painting can likewise be felt in Ismailovitch’s copies, although in the latter case this is inevitably constrained and subdued by the demand for precision.
The Constantinople watercolours and copies, however, stand apart from the rest of Ismailovitch’s creative work. His main output, as presented in exhibitions, consisted of landscapes executed in oil, along with still lifes and portraits. These works of art are completely devoid of colour dynamics, rather assuming a hieratic immobility. When Ismailovitch moved to Brazil in 1927, people began to explain this feature of his work through the influence of icons. This aspect was largely noted in relation to his portraits,49 which combined academic precision and detail with hieratic immobility, decorative elements, and a multitude of artistic references. The stylized portraits of Maria Margarida de Lima Soutello, his Brazilian student and muse, are typical in this regard. The artist variously depicts her: against a background of ancient Persian cloth showing a lion hunt; with a scythe in peasant dress against the backdrop of a monastic church; and in the form of Medusa. Whenever his past was raised for discussion, the Ukrainian artist preferred to shroud it with a degree of mystery, semi-mythologizing his work in the Kariye Camii. An extremely significant article by the prominent poet of Brazilian modernism Carlos Drummond de Andrade describes Ismailovitch’s studio, where all the walls were covered with paintings – Madonnas, halos, etc., evoking a mystical atmosphere of art that had become a religion.50
At first, Ismailovitch apparently saw his stay in Rio de Janeiro as temporary and expected to continue collaborating with archaeologists in Europe and elsewhere. In early 1929, he received a letter from Whittemore:
My dear Ismailovitch,
I have written to you in Rio de Janeiro, but I hear to the wrong address. Shaw has given me your present address and I write again.
I have had great satisfaction during the winter in using in my course on Byzantine Art at New York University lantern slides of your copies of mosaics and frescoes. Have you the original copy of the great head of the Madonna just bent forward, and would you allow me to own it. I should be so glad to hang it in my classroom.
A Byzantine Institute has been founded in America of which I am the director. The letter which I wrote to you asked if you ever think of coming to Europe and would consider copying for me in Egypt some frescoes which have never before been transcribed and for which I should like your hand. I eagerly wait your reply and hope that now in coming years I may fulfil my desire which I have so long entertained, but have been unable to accomplish, of incorporating you in this new Byzantine venture for which you are so notably fitted.
Most sincerely yours,
Thomas Whittemore.51
Though he had clearly considered leaving at first, Ismailovitch ultimately stayed in Rio – possibly because external circumstances were not conducive to a long journey, in combination with the fact that he had successfully integrated himself into the Brazilian city’s artistic life. For whatever reasons, by the middle of the 1930s the work at the Kariye Camii had become part of his past.52 He joined the Association of Brazilian Artists and began to exhibit in group shows, alongside the pupils who made up his ‘school’.
After two years there, Ismailovitch exhibited at the American embassy (December 1930–January 1931), including views of Rio, sketches of the plants in the local botanical gardens, still lifes with tropical fruits, and portraits of Aboriginal people. In March-April 1936, he travelled to the state of Bahia, returning with sketches he had made of traditional colonial church architecture, along with “studies of negro types.” When these were exhibited, the press drew parallels to his output in Constantinople and even asserted that, thanks to these works, Brazilians were able to see their national past for the first time. As reported in a major article that appeared in the Rio Journal in September 1936, under the heading “Dazzled by the Landscapes of Brazil, Ismailovitch Says That Our Artists Should Not Go to Europe,”53 the artist saw his sketching of colonial architecture as a conscious means of rendering service to Brazil. He urges Brazilian artists to abandon thoughts of travelling to decadent Europe and to turn instead to their own artistic heritage. He cites the example of the azulejos (glazed tiles), of which he made copies, noting how they emanate a force of primitivism that Picasso himself might envy.
In December of the same year, Ismailovitch continued his study of colonial architecture in Recife, a city built by the Dutch, which reminded him of Saint Petersburg. On 18 March 1937, the journal Caeté put on an evening in his honour at Café Lafayette, where he met various personalities, including the great anthropologist Gilberto Freyre. That same year, Freyre included Ismailovitch’s drawings in his book on mucambos, a term referring to straw huts or shanties (also to the shanty settlements established by fugitive Brazilian slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries).54 In 1937 Russian-language newspapers reported that Brazilian artists considered Ismailovitch one of their own; in that same year, he was granted Brazilian citizenship.
The mixed population of Recife (Africans, Indians, and descendants of Dutch settlers) supplied Ismailovitch with a wealth of anthropological material, which he continued to mine in collaboration with another of Brazil’s most important anthropologists, Arthur Ramos, a nationally and internationally recognized expert on Afro-Brazilian culture and a pioneer in the field of psychoanalysis. Portraits of various ethnic ‘types’, made by Ismailovitch in the second half of the 1930s, are kept in the Ramos Collection at the National Museum of Brazil. Some of them were published in Ramos’s Introduction to Brazilian Anthropology (1943–47).55 In the 1940s, Ismailovitch became a member of the Brazilian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology, which had been founded by Ramos in 1941. In addition to the sketches of Brazilian ethnic ‘types’, Ismailovitch made compositions incorporating ethnographic objects, symbols, and mucambos. They show a definite continuity with work he had undertaken in Istanbul compiling large, fanciful canvases based on fragments of Coptic fabrics (Fig. 7.8).
Dimitri Ismailovitch, Untitled [Study for a Tapestry], oil on canvas, 1920s
Collection of Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro
The anthropological and ethnographic material Ismailovitch amassed with Arthur Ramos was put to use in 1940, when, at the invitation of the famous composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, he took part in Sôdade do Cordão, a project to reconstruct a traditional carnival procession, in collaboration with Maria Margarida and the famous modernist artist Emiliano Di Cavalcanti. Ismailovitch and Margarida designed the carnival banners and masks that played a central role in the choreography of the Cordão. In addition, Ismailovitch painted a large triptych, entitled Sôdade do Cordão, which is preserved in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro. The composition, in which the artist depicts himself and Villa-Lobos surrounded by ‘typical’ portraits of the inhabitants of Brazil, amounts to a “celebration of the ethnic origins and cultural diversity of Brazil, as well as an attempt by the artist to situate himself within the invented tradition of ‘authentic’ carnival.”56 The generalized image of brasilidade that Ismailovitch here creates finds a kind of pendant in a large canvas from 1945, titled Ceja-Homenagem ao Aleijadinho, a fanciful adaptation of the theme of the Last Supper incorporating the characters of Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, the famous sculptor of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The composition is based on drawings Ismailovitch made from Aleijadinho’s large sculptures of prophets, in the sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in the state of Minas Gerais. Between 1942 and 1945, when Ismailovitch was working on them, the restoration of the sculptures had not yet begun, and they were in regrettably poor condition due to rainfall and pollution.
Ismailovitch’s expressive and lively drawings of the prophets can be compared to his copies from the Kariye Camii. However, the way in which the artist made use of them in his subsequent compositions is fundamentally different. Whereas in Brazil the artist’s ethnographic-anthropological concerns became part of a dialogue with the most prominent scholars of anthropology, whose research contributed to the formation of a national artistic identity, this had been impossible in Istanbul during the early years of the Turkish Republic. There, Ismailovitch’s work had been oriented exclusively to the concerns of an international context and related to the Russian artistic tradition. It was for this reason that he left Istanbul and opted to stay in Rio de Janeiro.
In 1881 Kondakov quoted the words of the diplomat and archaeologist Melchior de Vogüé, French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1871 and 1875, who had proposed that the mosaics of the Kariye Camii be removed and sold to France “to save them from destruction.” As Kondakov noted in response:
These mosaics have been sufficiently preserved, such that only an understandable desire to acquire them for the galleries of the Louvre could justify these recent propositions to the Turkish government.57
Had this been the case, then the exclusively international reception of the mosaics would have been justified. Preserving them in loco, on the other hand, inevitably ensconces them within the urban culture of Istanbul, which, provided that it remains open to the outside world, will sooner or later become assimilated into a national artistic consciousness.58 As pertains to the Kariye Camii and its mosaics, this is the lesson offered to us by the story of Dimitri Ismailovitch, the Ukrainian artist of Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro.
Acknowledgements
In 1995–96, André Guillou, who understood better than anyone the importance of cross-cultural research on the history of Byzantine studies and Russian emigration, provided invaluable support to my research project on the Byzantine Library, Paris. In the work for this article, I have benefitted from the advice of Ekaterina Aygün, Michele Bacci, Rémi Labrusse, and Alessandra Ricci, to whom I extend my warmest thanks. My special thanks go to Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, who invited me to Rio de Janeiro in 2009 and introduced me to their collection and to the Ismailovitch archive. Without the constant help of Eduardo Mendes Cavalcanti, working with the Ismailovitch legacy would not have been possible. Thanks to Liza Dimbleby for translating the article into English. Thanks finally to Gizella Lopusanszky and Alexander Demko for kind permission to publish Gritchenko’s watercolour from their collection.
Archives
Archive of the Byzantine Library, Paris
Archive of the Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux
Collection and Archive of Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro
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Podzemskaia, Nadia. “À propos des copies d’art byzantin à Istanbul: les artistes russes émigrés et l’Institut byzantin d’Amérique,” Histoire de l’art 44 (1999), 123–140.
Pulgher, Domenico. Les anciennes églises byzantines de Constantinople, relevées, dessinées et publiées. Vienne, 1878–1880.
Ramos, Arthur. Introdução à Antropologia Brasileira [Introduction to Brazilian Anthropology], 2 vols. Rio de Janeiro, 1943–1947.
Salatko-Petritsche, Valeriy F. “Vydayutschijsya russkij khudozhnik: K pyatidesyatiletiyu D.V. Izmajlovitcha” [An Outstanding Russian Artist: For the 50th Anniversary of Dimitri Ismailovich], Vozrozhdenie [La Renaissance] 197 (May 1968), 117–119.
Schmitt, Theodor. Kahrié-Djami: Istoriya monastyrya Khory, arkhitektura mecheti, mozaiki narfiksov [Kariye Camii: A History of the Chora Monastery, the Architecture of the Mosque, the Mosaics in the Narthexes]. Sofia, 1906.
Shaw, Wendy, M.K. Possessors and Possesed. Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire. Berkeley, Calif., 2003.
Shaw, Wendy, M.K. Ottoman Painting. Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. London/New York, 2011.
Susak, Vita. Alexis Gritchenko: Dynamocolor. Kyiv, 2017.
Teteriatnikov, Natalia, “Thomas Whittemore, the Byzantine Institute of America, and the Kariye,” in Kariye: from Theodore Metochites to Thomas Whittemore: one monument, two monumental personalities, edited by Holger A. Klein, Robert G. Ousterhout, and Brigitte Pitarakis, pp. 33–61. Istanbul, 2007.
Underwood, Paul A. The Kariye Djami, 3 vols. New York, 1966.
Vzdornov, Gerold. “Russkie khudozhniki i vizantijskoe iskusstvo v Konstantinopole” [Russian Artists and Byzantine Art in Constantinople], Tvorchestvo [Creation] (1992), 30–33.
Paul A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami (New York, 1966), p. VI. On the history of the RAIC, see Ekaterina Y. Basargina, Russkij arkheologicheskij institut v Konstantinopole: Ocherki istorii [The Russian Archaeological Institute of Constantinople: Historical Essays] (Saint Petersburg, 1999).
See Gerold I. Vzdornov, “Russkie khudozhniki i vizantijskoe iskusstvo v Konstantinopole” [Russian Artists and Byzantine Art in Constantinople], Tvorchestvo [Creation] 1 (1992), 30–33; Nadia Podzemskaia, “À propos des copies d’art byzantin à Istanbul: les artistes russes émigrés et l’Institut byzantin d’Amérique,” Histoire de l’art 44 (1999), 123–40.
See Rémi Labrusse and Nadia Podzemskaia, “Naissance d’une vocation. Aux sources de la carrière byzantine de Thomas Whittemore,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 54 (2000), 43–69; Natalia Teteriatnikov, “Thomas Whittemore, the Byzantine Institute of America, and the Kariye,” in Kariye: from Theodore Metochites to Thomas Whittemore; One Monument, Two Monumental Personalities, ed. Holger A. Klein, Robert G. Ousterhout, and Brigitte Pitarakis (Istanbul, 2007), pp. 33–61; Holger A. Klein, “The Elusive Mr. Whittemore: The Early Years, 1871–1916,” in Kariye Camii, Yeniden [The Kariye Camii Reconsidered], ed. idem, Robert G. Ousterhout, and Brigitte Pitarakis (Istanbul, 2011), pp. 467–80.
Alexis Gritchenko, Deux ans à Constantinople. Journal d’un peintre (Paris, 1930), p. 103.
On Gritchenko’s painting, see Vita Susak, Alexis Gritchenko: Dynamocolor (Kyiv, 2017). See also the artist’s books: Alexis Gritchenko, O svyazyakh russkoj zhivopisi s Vizantiey i Zapadom XIII–XX vv., Mysli zhivopistsa [Connections between Russian Painting, Byzantium, and the West in the XIII–XX Centuries: A Painter’s Thoughts] (Moscow, 1913); idem, Russkaya ikona kak iskusstvo zhivopisi [The Russian Icon as an Art of Painting] (Moscow, 1917).
“‘We were discussing, as ever, art and facture.’ Helene Nikolaievna (Ismailovitch’s wife) became angry: ‘I’m fed up with your facture!’ Mitya has gone crazy. He mumbles in the night: ‘Facture, facture! …’ ‘But wake up, darling, calm down!’ ‘She mocks me and accuses me of having left her Mitienka astray.’” Gritchenko, Deux ans à Constantinople, p. 280.
“The tireless Mitia organized an association of Russian and Turkish painters. He tries to connect”; “Mitia arrives joyful and restless as usual. He always wants to build up relations with the Turks.” Gritchenko, Deux ans à Constantinople, pp. 174, 240. On the Union of Russian Painters in Constantinople, see Ekaterina Aygün, “Union of Russian Painters in Constantinople,” in METROMOD Archive (2021). Available at https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/2949/object/5145–10440425. Accessed 15 Sept 2021.
Gritchenko, Deux ans à Constantinople, p. 174.
Of Gritchenko’s works exhibited in Athens in summer 1921, Adamantios Adamantiou, the first director of the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens, writes in his letter of recommendation to Charles Diehl: “He has a strong desire to go to Paris in order to organize an exhibition in young artistic circles. He has all his works, so he is selling only copies of his works and keeps the prototypes for museums in his home country.” Quoted in Aysenur Güler and Vita Susak, Alexis Gritchenko: The Constantinople Years (Istanbul, 2020), p. 64. Note also the artist’s exhibitions in Paris: 1921, Salon d’automne à Paris, Œuvres de Constantinople, choisies par Fernand Léger; 1922, Galerie Povolotsky, Constantinople bleu et rose; 1923, Galerie Paul Guillaume; 1928, Galerie Druet, Constantinople. Peintures et aquarelles par Gritchenko.
See Ekaterina Aygün, “Dimitri Ismailovitch,” in METROMOD Archive (2021). Available at https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/2949/object/5138–10436644. Accessed 22 Sept 2021.
See Ekaterina Aygün, “Foster Waterman Stearns,” in METROMOD Archive (2021). Available at https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/2949/object/5138-11017193. Accessed 15 Apr 2021.
See, for example, an undated clipping from the Russian-language Evening Gazette in Ismailovitch’s archive within the Collection and Archive of Eduardo and Leonardo Mendes Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro (hereafter CAELMC), with an interview by Nazmi Zia Bey, Director of the School of Fine Arts. He declares his interest in contemporary art movements in Russia and in emigration and expresses his desire to better get to know Russian artists, stating that he knows and greatly appreciates the Constantinople-based artists Nikolai Kalmykov and Ismailovitch.
Anonymous, “L’exposition du peintre russe Ismailovitch,” Journal d’Orient, Saturday, 5 April 1924. CAELMC.
“D.V. Ismailovitch,” separate print from the almanac [Russians on Bosphorus] (undated). CAELMC.
A. B-in, “Constantinople: The Refraction of the East,” Rus’, Wednesday, 7 July 1926. CAELMC.
Ibid.
Valeriy F. Salatko-Petritsche, “Vydayutschijsya russkij khudozhnik: K pyatidesyatiletiyu D.V. Izmajlovitcha” [An Outstanding Russian Artist: For the 50th Anniversary of Dimitri Ismailovich], Vozrozhdenie [La Renaissance] 197 (May 1968), 117–19, esp. 117.
Anonymous, “Découverte d’une fresque byzantine,” Journal d’Orient, Tuesday, 7 November 1922. CAELMC. The next day, the same newspaper returned to this story with further details about the destroyed mosque. Anonymous, “Les fiançailles de la Vierge,” Journal d’Orient, Wednesday, 8 November 1922. CAELMC.
Letter of Izmailovitch to Lemoine in French, 24 June 1948. Archive of the Museum of Fine Arts Bordeaux.
Mikhail V. Alpatov and Nikolay I. Brunov, “Kratkiy ottchet o poezdke na Vostok” [A Short Account of a Trip to the East], Vizaniyskiy vremennik [The Byzantine Chronicle] 24 (1926), 57–62.
CAELMC.
See the letters of Ismailovitch to Thomas Whittemore of 5 August and 23 December 1926, conserved in the Byzantine Library, Paris, and reproduced in Klein, Ousterhout, and Pitarakis, eds., Kariye: From Theodore Metochites to Thomas Whittemore.
When the copies arrived in Brazil, they were exhibited again, for example at the São Paulo Museum of Art in November 1952 and in Hamburg during the Christmas market season in 1966. See the materials in the CAELMC.
Lemoine warns Ismailovitch about its absence in a letter dated 12 April 1948 conserved in the CAELMC. On the exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, see Muriel Clayton, ed., Mosaics and Frescoes in Kahrié-Djami Constantinople Copied by Dmitri Ismailovitch, exh. cat. (London, 1928).
Jean-Gabriel Lemoine, Prestiges de Constantinople. La lumière et l’art byzantin, exh. cat. (Bordeaux, 1948).
On the problem of the identification of Turkish and Persian art in Western representations in the 19th and 20th centuries, see Rémi Labrusse, “Théories de l’ornement et ‘Renaissance orientale’: un modèle ottoman pour le XIXe siècle?” in L’orientalisme, les orientalistes et l’Empire ottoman: de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à la fin du XXe siècle, ed. Huguette Meunier-Chuvin (Paris, 2011), pp. 145–72; Rémi Labrusse, “Modernité byzantine: l’exposition internationale d’art byzantin de 1931 à Paris,” in Le double voyage: Paris-Athènes (1919–1939), ed. Lucile Arnoux-Farnoux, and Polina Kosmadaki (Athens, 2018), pp. 221–42; Frédéric Hitzel and Mireille Jacotin, Iznik. L’aventure d’une collection. Les céramiques ottomanes du Musée national de la Renaissance-Château d’Écouen (Paris, 2005).
In that period, the museum was located in the imaret building of the Suleymaniye Mosque Social Complex.
Gritchenko, Deux ans à Constantinople, p. 265.
Ibid., pp. 164–65.
Ibid., p. 165.
Ibid., p. 179.
Ibid., p. 181.
On Matisse’s notion of the East, see Rémi Labrusse, “Byzance et l’art moderne. La référence byzantine dans les cercles artistiques d’avant-garde au début du XXe siècle,” in Présence de Byzance, ed. Jean-Michel Spieser (Paris, 2007), pp. 55–89 and 150–73.
The process of integrating ancient and Byzantine archaeological treasures into the collections of Istanbul museums, which had already begun in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century, was slow and difficult. With the inception of the Turkish Republic, which challenged artists to develop a new patriotic iconography, this issue was neglected even further. See Wendy M.K. Shaw, Possessors and Possesed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, Calif., 2003); eadem, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London/New York, 2011).
The series of Çalli’s drawings that was closest to Gritchenko’s work concerned subjects of whirling dervishes and petition writers. See Güler and Susak, Alexis Gritchenko: the Constantinople years, pp. 160–63.
CAELMC.
Ibid.
Nikolay K. Kluge, Kariye-Djami. Al’bom k XI tomu Izvestij Russkogo Arkheologicheskogo Instituta v Konstantinopole [Kariye-Djami. Album for Volume XI of the Bulletin of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople: Drawings and Sketches] (Munich, 1906).
It should be noted that there is a pencil portrait of Mustafa Kemal by Ismailovitch in the CAELMC. It is dated 1926, during the period of his intensive production of copies from the Kariye Camii.
Domenico Pulgher, Les anciennes églises byzantines de Constantinople, relevées, dessinées et publiées (Vienne, 1878–80).
Theodor Schmitt, Kahrié-Djami: Istoriya monastyrya Khory, arkhitektura mecheti, mozaiki narfiksov [Kariye Camii: A History of the Chora Monastery, the Architecture of the Mosque, the Mosaics in the Narthexes] (Sofia, 1906), p. 51.
Nikodim P. Kondakov, Mozaiki mecheti Kahrie-Djamisi Moni ths xwras v Konstantinopole [Mosaics of the Kariye Camii Mosque Mone tes Choras in Constantinople] (Odessa, 1881).
Charles Diehl, “Les mosaïques de Kahrié-Djami,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1904–05; repr. in idem, Études byzantines: introduction à l’histoire de Byzance (Paris, 1905), p. 396.
Kondakov’s pamphlet, writes Schmitt (idem, Kariye Camii, p. 51), took on a “merely strategic significance,” in that Kondakov needed to demonstrate the true significance of the Kariye Camii mosaics for the history of art. However, Schmitt adds that no one, of course, understood better than the author himself the qualitative and quantitative insufficiency of the material he had to make use of.
Kondakov, Mosaics of the Kariye Camii, p. 4.
Nikodim P. Kondakov, Vizantijskie tserkvi i pamyatniki Konstantinopolya [The Byzantine Churches and Monuments of Constantinople] (Odessa, 1886).
Charles Diehl’s quite characteristic explanation is as follows: “Certainly, as in almost all works of Byzantine art, the drawing is sometimes awkward, the anatomy often simplistic; that is why photography, by underlining these weaknesses, by erasing the magnificence of the colour that conceals them in reality, cannot give a completely accurate idea of these remarkable works.” See idem, “Les mosaïques de Kahrié-Djami,” p. 439.
Gritchenko, Deux ans à Constantinople, p. 189.
Once in Rio de Janeiro at the invitation of the American embassy, Ismailovitch immediately became an insider in diplomatic circles there, as he had previously been in Istanbul. Portraying central figures of Brazilian political and cultural life – among them the famous writer and forerunner of modernism Graça Aranha – became an essential part of his work; it was a quick and direct way to enter the artistic life of Rio.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Ismailovitch e o mosteiro” [Ismailovitch and the Monastery], Journal do Brazil [Journal of Brazil] 21 October 1976. CAELMC.
Letter from the “American Committee for the Education of Russian Youth,” Paris, 9 February 1929. CAELMC.
In 1935, Ismailovitch was prepared to sell his copies. In a letter to Gardiner Howland Shaw housed in the Byzantine Library in Paris and dated 3 March of that year, the artist, citing financial difficulties, proposes to sell him his Byzantine collection (37 reproductions and 15 studies) for 2,000 dollars and, as an alternative, asks to him to find another buyer through Thomas Whittemore.
“Deslumbrado com as paisagens do Brasil Ismailovitch diz que os nossos pintores não devem ir a Europa” [Dazzled by the Landscapes of Brazil Ismailovitch Says That Our Painters Should Not Go to Europe], Rio Journal, 8 September 1936. CAELMC.
Gilberto Freyre, Mucambos do Nordeste [Shanties in Northeast] (Rio de Janeiro, 1937).
Arthur Ramos, Introdução à Antropologia Brasileira [Introduction to Brazilian Anthropology], 2 vols (Rio de Janeiro, 1943–47).
Rafael Cardoso, Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race, and Identity in Brazil, 1890–1945 (Cambridge, 2021), p. 246. See also idem, “Imaginação diaspórica ou apropriação cultural?: A afro-brasilidade nas obras de Dimitri Ismailovitch e Maria Margarida Soutello” [Cultural Appropriation or Diasporic Imagination? Afro-Brazilian Identity in the Works of Dimitri Ismailovitch and Maria Margarida Soutello], Modos: revista de história da arte 6/1, (January 2022), 378–410. Available at https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/mod/article/view/8667205. Accessed 15 Sept 2021.
Kondakov, Mosaics of the Kariye Camii, p. 2.
An exhibition at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, in 2021/22 showed works by two Turkish artists, Fikret Mualla and Nejad Melih Devrim, influenced by Byzantine painting and, in one way or another, by modern European traditions. See Brigitte Pitarakis, ed., From Istanbul to Byzantium: Paths of Rediscovery 1800–1955, exh. cat. (Istanbul, 2021), pp. 628–33.