Ananias the Iconographer
Our Venerable Father Ananias the Iconographer, of the Monastery of Saint Antony the Roman at Novgorod
Venerable · d. 1521 (also given as 1561 and as 1581), at the Antoniev Monastery, Novgorod
Commemorated 17 June — Repose at the Monastery of Saint Antony the Roman, Novgorod (the day given by the OCA), 21 June — Placement followed by some Russian lists; not verified against a primary source
Ananias was a monk of the Monastery of Saint Antony the Roman at Novgorod and a painter of icons, remembered for two things: the beauty of the images he made of the holy wonderworkers, and the fact that for thirty-three years he never once passed outside the monastery walls. He reposed in the sixteenth century — the year is given variously as 1521, 1561 and 1581 — and was buried in the monastery, at a place no longer known. He is commemorated on June 21, and again with the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod on the third Sunday after Pentecost.
The Antoniev Monastery
The house in which Ananias spent his life was one of the oldest and strangest foundations of the Russian north: the Antoniev monastery on the right bank of the Volkhov at Novgorod, founded at the beginning of the twelfth century by Antony the Roman — the ascetic whom the Novgorod tradition holds to have been carried from Italy to Novgorod standing on a rock, and whose stone was shown in the monastery church for centuries afterwards. Its cathedral of the Nativity of the Theotokos, built 1117–1122 and frescoed in 1125, still stands. By the sixteenth century the Antoniev was a large and wealthy house inside the archiepiscopal city, at the centre of the northern Russian tradition of icon-painting, with a scriptorium and workshops.
The painter
Ananias was Russian by birth and was tonsured at the Antoniev. The one gift the tradition records of him is the gift of painting: "God endowed him with the art of icon-painting, and he practised it to the glory of the Lord." He painted, the notice says, many icons of the holy wonderworkers — that is, of the saints of the Russian north whose cults were then being gathered and given liturgical form, in the decades of the great Muscovite councils of 1547 and 1549 which canonised so many of them. A Novgorod icon-painter of that generation was, in effect, giving faces to saints who had just received their offices; the work Ananias did was the visual half of a national canonisation.
Not one panel can now be securely attributed to him. Novgorod icon-painters of the sixteenth century did not sign their work, and the Antoniev's holdings were dispersed and largely lost in the suppressions of the eighteenth century and the catastrophes of the twentieth.
Thirty-three years within the walls
The second thing transmitted of him is an ascetic detail, and it is the reason he is remembered as a saint and not merely as an artist: for thirty-three years he did not go outside the monastery enclosure. The number is not a rhetorical flourish in the Russian sources but a measured span, and it belongs to a recognised discipline — the monk's vow of non-departure, stability pressed to its limit, by which the cell and the church and the workshop become the whole world. It is a discipline peculiarly suited to a painter, whose work requires the same room, the same light and the same long stillness; and the Russian tradition reads the two facts together, the confinement and the icons, as one life rather than two.
Repose and relics
He reposed at the Antoniev in the sixteenth century. His relics rest in the monastery, in a place that is not known — the burial was not marked, or the mark was lost, and the Russian notices say frankly that the spot is hidden. He is venerated without a shrine.
Feast and commemoration
June 21 (church date; New Calendar civil June 21, Old Calendar civil July 4) in Russian and OCA usage; the Greek books do not keep him, and his commemoration is local to Novgorod in origin. He is also commemorated in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod, kept on the third Sunday after Pentecost — a movable commemoration, and therefore not recorded among the fixed feasts in this entry's frontmatter. June 21 falls inside the Apostles' Fast in most years, the fast having no fixed beginning but always ending on June 28.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable monastic)
In thee, O Father, was the image of God preserved unimpaired; for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Ananias, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
Ananias is painted as a Russian monastic elder: in the black mantiya and koukoulion or the simple skoufia, grey-bearded, one hand raised in blessing or held to the breast, the other holding a scroll. Where he is distinguished at all from the other monastic saints of Novgorod, it is by the attribute proper to his craft — a small icon-panel held in the hand, or the brush and board of the painter, the convention used for Alypius of the Kiev Caves and the other iconographer-saints. His usual place, however, is not a solo panel but the crowded composition of the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod, where the city's saints are ranged in rows about the Theotokos of the Sign, and he stands among the monastics of the Antoniev with Antony the Roman, the founder.
No pre-1900 image identified as this Ananias has been located for this collection. The Novgorod synaxis icons are numerous and old, but the figures in them are identified by tiny painted inscriptions that are illegible in the available reproductions, so that no candidate can be verified as depicting him rather than one of the dozens of others in the same rank. He wants an icon.
Disputed questions
- The year of his repose. The sources give 1521, 1561 and 1581, a spread of sixty years, and none of the three can be preferred on present evidence. The century is secure; the year is not. This entry records all three and assigns the sixteenth century.
- His works. No surviving icon is attributed to him by any documented tradition. Attributions occasionally met with are modern and speculative.
- Not to be confused with the other saints of the name — Ananias of Damascus, the apostle of the Seventy who baptised Saul (October 1); Ananias of Persia, the martyr; Ananias, Azarias and Misael, the Three Youths of Babylon; and Ananias, Peter and the Seven Soldiers. This Ananias is a Russian monastic of the sixteenth century and none of the above.