Bogdan Saltanov

Who was Bogdan Saltanov?

Bogdan Saltanov, also known as Ivan Ievlevich Saltanov, was an Armenian-born Russian painter at the court of Alexis I of Russia and his successors. Saltanov headed the painting workshop of the Kremlin Armoury from 1686. Saltanov's legacy include Orthodox icons for church and secular use, illuminated manuscripts, secular parsuna portraits including the portraits of Stepan Razin and Feodor III of Russia as a young man.

Igor Grabar considered Saltanov and his contemporaries Ivan Bezmin and Vasily Poznansky as the fourth and the last class of Simon Ushakov school, an "extreme left wing in the history of Russian icon art, the Jacobins whose art departed with the last traces of an already evaporated tradition". Studies of the 1990s–2000s partially refute this statement, asserting that Saltanov was substantially independent of Ushakov and his legacy.