Alypius the Iconographer

The boy given to the Caves

Alypius was born at Kiev about the middle of the eleventh century, of parents who — in the formula of the Paterikon — "gave him to be taught the sacred books" and then brought him to the Monastery of the Caves, the house founded by Anthony and Theodosius which was by then the spiritual centre of the Rus'. He entered as a boy and never left it.

His formation as a painter was accidental in the way that vocations often are. In 1083 a company of mosaicists and icon-painters from Constantinople arrived at the monastery to decorate the newly built stone church of the Dormition — the Velikaya tserkov', the Great Church of the Caves. Alypius, still a youth, was set to serve them and to watch, and so learned the whole Byzantine craft at first hand: the preparation of the board, the gesso, the gold, the ordered laying of the colours, and the mosaic-work of the sanctuary. He was, in the exact sense, the pupil of the Greeks, and through him the Constantinopolitan manner passed into native hands.

The Paterikon fixes the moment of his calling with a wonder. As the Greek masters worked at the altar-mosaic, an image of the Theotokos imprinted itself upon the wall of its own accord and shone out brighter than the sun, so that the workmen fell down; and from the mouth of the image a dove flew, which circled the church and vanished behind the icon of the Saviour. Alypius saw it, and it settled his life. He was tonsured by the igumen Nikon (†23 March 1088), and was afterwards ordained hieromonk.

The rule of a painter

What the tradition principally preserves is not the style of his icons but the rule he kept over his work, and it is this that made him the pattern for every Russian iconographer after him:

• He took nothing for painting. Icons were made for the churches of Kiev without charge. Where a donor pressed money on him, he divided it into three: one part for boards, colours and gold; one part given away to the poor; one part for his own bare necessity.
• He never let the work displace the services. He painted only in the hours between the offices; when the semantron sounded he laid down the brush, whatever stage the work had reached.
• He sought out neglected icons. The Paterikon says that if he learned of an icon in a church of the city that had grown dark or damaged, he would fetch it, restore it, and return it without being asked and without fee.

He is credited with the mosaic and fresco work of the Great Church alongside his Greek masters, and with a number of icons that became objects of veneration; the tradition attaches his name in particular to the Svenskaya (Pechersk) Icon of the Mother of God, which is kept on this same day, and which shows the Theotokos enthroned between Anthony and Theodosius of the Caves — although the surviving panel is of the later thirteenth century and cannot be his hand.

The wonders of the Paterikon

The Kiev Caves Paterikon, compiled in the thirteenth century out of the letters of Bishop Simon of Vladimir and the monk Polycarp, gathers the miracles told of him:

The leper. A citizen of Kiev, eaten with leprosy, had gone the round of physicians and sorcerers and got nothing but worse. At last he came to the Caves, was anointed and communed, and Alypius painted his face with the colours from his own brushes, laying them on the sores as an ointment; the man washed, and the disease came away with the water. The point of the story, as the Paterikon tells it, is not the cure but its instrument: the pigments of the sacred art heal because they are consecrated by the use to which they are put.

The two monks and the seven icons. A man of Kiev, building a church, sent money by two monks of the monastery for seven great icons. The two kept the money and, on three separate occasions, told the donor that Alypius demanded more; and then reported to him that Alypius had refused the work altogether. Summoned before the igumen, Alypius answered truthfully that he had never been asked. But when the boards were fetched, the seven icons were found finished upon them, of surpassing beauty — painted, the Paterikon says, by an angel, in the night. The two thieves were expelled.

The fire. When the church for which those icons had been made burned to the ground, the seven icons were found whole in the ashes, untouched by the fire; Vladimir Monomakh sent one of them to Rostov, where it survived the fall of two successive churches.

The angel at his death. In his last illness Alypius was unable to finish an icon of the Dormition of the Theotokos commissioned for the feast. A young man came, took up the brushes, and completed it in a single evening, working — the tradition insists — with a speed and delicacy no human hand could equal; and when the saint asked who he was, he was not to be found. Three days later, at the hour of Alypius's repose, the same figure was seen beside him and received his soul. He died on 17 August 1114 and was buried in the Near Caves, where his relics rest.

Legacy

Alypius stands at the head of the Russian iconographic tradition, and the Paterikon's portrait of him — unpaid, obedient to the bell, and attended by angels at the board — set the terms in which the Russian Church would afterwards think about the painter's craft: it is a form of prayer done with the hands, and its fruit is not a picture but a presence. Every later Russian master, down to Andrei Rublev, works inside the frame Alypius was remembered as having established.