| Sumario: | This paper suggests that a line of thought can be identified within Russian scholarship as early as the 1920s and the 1930s that deals, often in a profound way, with the problem of time in the visual arts. This becomes all the more significant when considering the history of the neglect of this problem, springing from an outright denial that painting, sculpture, and architecture have a genuine temporal dimension. It is only recently that philosophers and art historians have paid more consistent attention to the role that time plays in the arts, which have traditionally been considered exclusively spatial. The first section of this paper attempts to provide an idea of the still prevailing categorization of the arts into the spatial and the temporal. It will then critically discuss Pavel Florensky's (1885-1937) notion of 'reverse time', which claims to describe the flow of time in dreams and art. Most importantly, Florensky presents the first serious attempt so far to work out a theory of the temporal dimension underlying the Eastern Orthodox icon. The third section this paper will discuss the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's (1895-1975) much more familiar category of the 'chronotope' for the theory of the visual arts. It will suggest that with both authors we can talk of an 'Einstein connection', as their ideas grow partly out of a realization of the space-time interconnectedness, which is a major aspect of Einstein's relativity theory. This paper does not claim that there is any direct influence between the two Russian scholars -- though it is possible that Bakhtin might have known some of Florensky's works. Rather it views their texts as part of a common discourse, with important implications for art criticism. Neither Florensky, nor Bakhtin developed a comprehensive theory. However, even though undeveloped, the notions of reverse time' and of the 'chronotope' can lay a foundation for future studies.
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