Bogdan Saltanov  Bogdan Saltanov (; 1630s – 1703), also known as Ivan Ievlevich Saltanov, was a Persian-born Armenian 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 includes 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 (see Attribution problem). 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. In 1660 Zakar Sagradov, an Armenian trader from New Julfa, serving as an envoy of the Shah of Persia, delivered the Shah's gifts to Tsar Alexis. The package included, among other items, an engraved copper board depicting the Last Supper. The board aroused the interest of the tsar who instructed Sagradov to return to Persia and hire the engraver into the tsar's service. Muscovite artists were only experimenting with engravings on metal, and the tsar needed a professional to set up the new craft. The copper board was, most likely, a Western European product, however, Sagradov responded that he can hire at least an apprentice of the author. Six years later Saltanov, "the apprentice", arrived in Moscow with his brother, joined the staff of the Armoury and received a high salary. He was treated as a foreign noble, an honor rarely issued without reason. The artist converted to Russian Orthodoxy eight years later: conversion was equivalent to an oath of loyalty to the Romanovs and earned him the honors of a Russian noble, but also prevented the artist from ever leaving Russia. His brother, Stepan Saltanov, also became a Russian noble, a treasurer of the Armoury and a founder of the Saltanov family. Bogdan Saltanov became the last court painter hired before the death of Simon Ushakov, the undisputed leader of Muscovite art school. Ushakov rated Saltanov's skills as mediocre.