Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

I. RÉSZTANULMÁNYOK - Marina Peltzer: A lubok - az orosz vallásos népi fametszet - a 18-19. század fordulóján: avagy a látomások és látásmódok változásáról

4079)that it was forbidden to have engraved icons apart from crucifixions and panagia (the pictorial representations of the Virgin). An edict of 1744 (10 May, n° 8935) shows that an effective type of surveillance of peasant isbas was set up by religious authorities in order to check whether the icons were being kept clean, to order them be refurbished and kept free from dust or to be replaced if blackened by smoke. At the end of 1744 (18 October, n° 9049) and in 1745 (n° 9157) private production was allowed in return for a double censorship prior to engraving and printing; this clause was reiterated in the edict of 1760 (6 November, n° 11140) in view of the extension of the free market, which was also expanding in St Petersburg. Particularly prosecuted at that time was the sale of woodcuts picturing miracles not yet approved by the Synod, among others those of the thaumaturge Dmitrij, metropolitan of Rostov, recently canonized. Whereas the Synod essentially controlled the decency of sales outlets and compliance with ecclesiastical canons, it was also entrusted from 1723 onwards with taking measures against portraits of the sovereigns, which were too unskilfully made, and whose surveillance was entrusted to Zarudnyj's care. The secular lubok also fell within his competence as appear from the synodal documents specifying the nature of the confiscated goods. One of them, a crucial testimony from 1731, listed secular woodcuts, among others the well-known Burying of the Cat, seized at the same time as religious woodcuts on the person of Stepan Fedotov, a peasant-merchant supplier of Grigorij Cernyj, worker at the Mint, trading in the Kremlin itself.

27 It appears nevertheless that the Synod confined itself in the end to purely religious prints, as can be seen regarding manufacturers Dmitrij Skobelkin, Chlebnikov and Ilja Jakovlevic Achmetjev. The Synod was fully aware too of the system of monopolies, allowed for the production of religious images to Michail Artemjev in 1759 (these were prints in mezzotint) and then in the 1860s, to Achmetjev and to Chlebnikov. Which did not exempt the latter in the least from censorship! The Academy of Arts tolerated officially this production and the sale on a large scale for being of a rather poor quality and reserved for particularly modest people". But vigilance was maintained over the portraits of the tsars, and those which were not good replicas of the model imposed in high places were discarded, even if they had no satirical intention whatsoever. The decree of 9 July 1804, § 25, extended this measure to portraits of private individuals. All in all, as was specified in the edict of Siskov from 10 June 1826, confirming the preliminary censorship, image-makers were allowed (§ 183) to engrave moral and useful images, or just harmless ones; they ought not be harmful to the government, to the ordinary people, to any other social class or to any individual;portraits of the imperial family had to be of artistic quality and true to life; caricatured representations (§ 185) presenting vices in a humorous way, provided that they did not relate to any individual in particular, were not submitted to any ban. An engraving from the 18th century such as The Disembowelling of the Butcher by a Bull (Rov. n° 176) was declared subversive and suppressed in the 1840s. Can one assume with Rovinskij that the whole production of secular imagery had freed itself and resumed its former freedom until 1839? Part of its production, among others the portraits of the sovereigns and of the heroes (particularly those of 1812), was then required for examination by the board of censorship. In 1851, when the Russian censors wondered what to do with these rather embarrassing images, the problem was. finally entrusted through the Ministry of Education and of the Interior to the tsar's private chancellery. The latter, in the person of count Bludov, carried out a detailed investigation and stated that „these artistic expressions undoubtedly rather crude but harmless", had been, in all likelihood, submitted to ecclesiastical censorship and that there was thus no cause for alarm. At any rate, it was better to leave it at that, for „the art of these images does not remain unchanged and