Alexei Isupov (Alessio Issupoff). Mother and Children, 1921

The turn toward the techniques and minimalism of the Quattrocento brought with it a particular choice of subjects and imagery that fitted the style of early European painting of the transition period, which had seen the first elements of genre painting introduced to art that had previously been religious. As a twentieth-century artist, Isupov moved in the opposite direction, giving secular, everyday scenes religious overtones. His tempera painting Mother and Children, which features two women, a baby, and a slightly older child, brings to mind the four-figure compositions of the Renaissance that typically featured the Virgin Mary with the infant Christ, John the Baptist, and St. Anne. This intertextuality means that the characters, depicted with ethnographical attention to detail, look extratemporal and epic. An everyday scene from Samarkand gains a biblical aspect, in the same way as Ruvim Mazel’s works of the early 1920s, in which Turkmen people seemed to illustrate the prophetic books of the Old Testament. 

Boris Chukhovich