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" (Russian: Они являются “крайней левой” в истории русской иконописи ушаковской эпохи — теми якобинцами, в искусстве которых исчезают последние следы и без того уже довольно призрачной традиции).

[7] Bogdan Saltanov became the last court painter hired before the death of Simon Ushakov, the undisputed leader of Muscovite art school.

[3] Saltanov was the fourth foreign artist employed by the Moscow court (after the Swede Johann Deterson, hired in 1643, Pole Stanislaw Loputsky and Dutchman Daniel Wouchters).

All the Slavic chiefs of painters' workshop, including Simon Ushakov, were naturally born nobles, and apparently, Saltanov was also recognized as such.

[9] Saltanov remains a controversial figure: his activities in Moscow are extensively documented through extant archive records, but no single piece of art has been indisputably attributed to the artist.

All opinions on his artistic style are not more reliable than the underlying attribution of his least questionable works - the tafta icons and the portrait of Feodor III of Russia.

The portrait of Feodor III of Russia was commissioned by Sophia Alekseyevna in 1685 to Simon Ushakov and Ivan Maksimov, but both these icon painters declined the job, and it passed to Saltanov.