Culture : The Holy War Over Russia’s Prized Icons : Who owns religious art? Give it to the church, orders President Yeltsin. Keep it in museums, say distraught curators.

At the Tretyakov Gallery’s department of antiquities, they were already past the first stage of mourning--denial--and were well into anger.

“This is just crime,” said a resentful Valentina Ukhanova, senior research associate at the gallery’s department of ancient Russian art. “It could happen only in Russia.”

If Ukhanova and her colleagues at this country’s leading gallery of Russian art were sounding as if someone dear to them had passed on, that is not surprising.

For on Nov. 4, President Boris N. Yeltsin announced, during the consecration of the newly restored Kazan Cathedral in Red Square, that he had signed an order turning over two of the Tretyakov Gallery’s most precious objects to the Russian Orthodox Church, the owner from which they had been seized by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution.

The objects--the 12th-Century “Vladimir Mother of God” and the 15th-Century “Old Testament Trinity” by the painter Andrei Rublev--are ancient icons of worldwide artistic significance as well as great religious importance. Preserved for centuries by the church, they have been cared for over the last few decades by the Tretyakov and its peerless antiquities department, the home of some of Russia’s leading art restorers.

But now, with a single, curt order, Yeltsin has laid bare a conflict between two irreconcilable Russian institutions and forced the country to confront an enduring cultural riddle: To whose world, God’s or Caesar’s, does a great ecclesiastical work of overwhelming secular beauty belong?

“This is the only icon of such quality that has been preserved from the 12th Century,” says Nadezhda V. Rozanova, head of the Tretyakov’s Old Russian art department, of the Vladimir Madonna. “Nowhere in the world is there an icon of such quality. It is a world monument.”

Responds Father Vladimir Ivakov, chancellor of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church: “Icons themselves are of paramount importance to the church; their artists strived to show not only their talent but their spirit and soul.” Referring to the traditional protective power ascribed to the Vladimir icon, he adds: “At the bleakest moments of their history, the Russian people turned to it in prayer.”

No mediator can hope to find a middle ground here. “The principle is right: What belongs to the church should be in a church,” says Ilya Glazunov, one of the country’s leading contemporary painters and critics and an expert on ancient art. “But on the other hand, so much of our cultural heritage was lost when the Communists burned the churches and icons that those that remain in museums are guaranteed preservation, and that is also important.”

The president’s announcement has sent a chilly wind through the Tretyakov and other state galleries in part because they fear it is the prelude to a more comprehensive raid on the museums in the name of restoring expropriated works of art to the church. As Rozanova observes, three years ago the church submitted a list of 33 artworks it wanted returned out of state museums; twice since then the list has been expanded.

In its efforts to resist, the gallery has the support of Yeltsin’s own Ministry of Culture, which says his order was “totally unexpected.”

“Experts at the Culture Ministry believe that in no civilized country of Western Europe or in America are pieces of art of such age and value kept in churches,” says Alexander Petrov, the ministry’s official spokesman. “Unfortunately, the opinion of specialists is often ignored.”

Petrov also notes that the presidential decree does not specify the terms of the transfer or when it will occur, although he says there is an “impression” that it might take place early next year. Yeltsin’s order has not been formally published and the gallery says it has received no official notification.

What makes this dispute uniquely a Russian one is the very nature of the works at issue. Icons are the central devotional objects of the Russian Orthodox Church, which makes up for what it may lack in theological depth with a richness of liturgical and representational expression unmatched by any other Western religion. The Russians inherited from Byzantine Greece an enthusiasm for these Madonnas, saviors and saints painted on wood, but their artists soon outdid their forebears in skill and workmanship.

They also stripped from these images the Byzantine view of a stern, unforgiving God, substituting a softer, more hopeful vision that itself colored the church’s own worldview.

As they moved to the foreground of religious attention, icons also became ubiquitous household objects; virtually no Russian hut, or izba, was without a corner in which an icon hung, illuminated by a smoky candle.

Over time, icons came to represent more than just a Russian art form; like jazz for Americans, calligraphy for Japanese and opera for Italians, they were considered the repositories of authentic culture, of the peoples’ spirituality and soul.

Even against this backdrop the two icons at the core of the latest dispute are special treasures.

*

The “Vladimir Mother of God” is the most revered and perhaps most copied icon in Russia. Painted in Constantinople in the early 12th Century, its transfer to Moscow parallels the cherished Russian notion that the center of Christian observance migrated, after Rome, from Constantinople to Moscow--the “Third Rome.”

Along the way the Madonna acquired a reputation for miracle-working and as the protectress of Russian soil. In 1395, it was thought that the icon’s presence in Moscow helped the city’s defenders avert an assault by the Mongol warrior Tamerlane. About 150 years later, she was awarded credit for inspiring Ivan the Terrible’s victory over the Tatars at Kazan, for which she is also known as “Our Lady of Kazan.”

The 15th-Century “Old Testament Trinity,” or Troitsa, of Andrei Rublev is considered the signal masterpiece of that artist--an enduring cultural hero as the greatest icon painter and one of the greatest artists Russia ever produced.

“Romain Rolland (the French writer and Nobel laureate) called the Troitsa the greatest artwork of all humanity,” says Glazunov. “Matisse was known to say that every contemporary painter was obligated to study Russian icons.”

Tretyakov officials argue that to entrust such communal treasures to the narrow interests of the church is to invite their removal from general view.

Church officials dispute this, noting that their plan is to reinstall the icons in the Kremlin’s Uspensky Sobor, or Church of the Assumption, from which they were seized and which is open to the public.

“This is a church which also has the official status of a museum,” says Father Vladimir.

For all that, the qualities that make the Uspensky a remarkable artistic and architectural monument can be detrimental to its use as a display case for great individual works. Its main space, a towering but confining chamber paneled with icons and paintings of spectacular color and brilliantly filigreed in gold, has precious little room for serene contemplation.

Crowded and uninsulated, the Uspensky Sobor also presents costly obstacles to creating a safe, hermetic environment for the Vladimir and Rublev icons.

Gallery officials caution that the Vladimir icon has suffered particular damage over the centuries, its layers of oil-based paint peeling off in chips until only the face of the serene Madonna herself, cradling a preternaturally composed-looking infant Jesus, is thought to be original.

Father Vladimir says that the church intends to consult experts nationwide, including at the Tretyakov, on how to protect the objects. But the Tretyakov is not encouraged by what happened the last Time the Vladimir icon was entrusted to the Patriarchate.

That was last Oct. 3, when the gallery lent it out for a special peace service aimed at quieting political tensions in Moscow. (As it happened, the city erupted in violence that afternoon.) Deprived for seven hours of the controlled temperature and humidity of the gallery, the icon developed cracks along its surface and a bulge under the layer of paint at the infant’s heel.

There is also a concern about sheer physical security.

“The number of art thefts this year has surpassed last year’s figure by eight to 10 times,” says Petrov of the Culture Ministry.

“In Tyumen, for instance, a painting by Raphael Levitan--size 3 meters by 4--was stolen together with its frame. Our police, who were supposed to answer an alarm at the museum within four minutes, arrived two hours later.”