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This is the first study in any language to trace the emergence of the art historical interest in icon painting in the nineteenth century with its evident impact on the course of Russian modernism in the twentieth century. Given the surge in popularity of the Russian avant-garde, a book devoted to the gradual awareness of the artistic value of icons and their effect on Russian aesthetics is timely. The discoveries, the false starts, the incompetence, the interaction of dilettantes and academics, the meddling of tsars and church officials, all make for a fascinating tale of growing cultural awarenss. It is a story that prepares the ground for the explosioin of Russian cultural creativity and acceptability in the early twentieth century.
Enigma in Rus and Medieval Slavic Cultures is a thematic essay volume to investigate the history and function of enigma in Orthodox Slavic cultures with a special focus on the cultural history of Rus and Muscovy. Its seventeen case studies across disciplinary boundaries analyze Slavic biblical and patristic translations, liturgical commentaries, occult divinatory texts, and dream interpretations. Slavic riddles inscribed on walls and compilations of riddles in question-and-answer format are all subjects of this volume. Not only written, but also pictorial enigmas are examined, together with their relationships to texts suggesting novel methodologies for their deciphering. This kaleidoscopic survey of Enigma in Rus and Medieval Slavic Cultures by an international group of scholars demonstrates the historiographical challenges that medieval enigmatic thought poses for researchers and offers new approaches to the interpretation of medieval sources, both verbal and visual.
After a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire struggled to reassert its position as a global power. A small noble family returned from the siege of Sevastopol and joined the rulers' efforts to advance Russian standing in the decades until 1917. Intimate Empire tells the story of the Mansurovs, who were known to nineteenth-century observers as resourceful imperial agents and staunch supporters of Orthodoxy. In close interplay with scholarship and the media, they built churches and pilgrim hostels to increase Russian dominance within its borders and in the Ottoman Empire. Some of the family's achievements stand to this day: the Russian complex in Jerusalem and an impressive...
Inside Christian churches, natural light has long been harnessed to underscore theological, symbolic, and ideological statements. In this volume, twenty-four international scholars with various specialties explore how the study of sunlight can reveal essential aspects of the design, decoration, and function of medieval sacred spaces. Themes covered include the interaction between patrons, advisors, architects, and artists, as well as local negotiations among competing traditions that yielded new visual and spatial constructs for which natural light served as a defining and unifying factor. The study of natural light in medieval churches reveals cultural relations, knowledge transfer patterns...
Recent discussions on Byzantine art have been dominated by the question of representing realia. Among these, however, the way works of art reflect the daily life of women have not received much space or attention. The present book studies various images representing women's status and her performative tasks, and their significance from the fourth century to the fall of the Empire, through analysis of archaeological evidence and works of art. It addresses a wide range of questions, some pertaining both to pictorial traditions and to their late antique antecedents, others peculiar to changing and evolving Byzantine culture and mentality. The first chapter deals with the imagery of childbearing...
Studies in particular monastic revivals in the 19th and 20th centuries, as epitomized by Trinity-Sergius.
In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective art...
Serves as both visual and textual record of the exhibition of the same name, surveying the art of the Middle Byzantine period from the restoration of the use of icons by the Orthodox Church in 843 to the occupation of Constantinople by the Crusader forces from the West from 1204 to 1261. Conceived as a sequel to the 1976 exhibition "Age of Spirituality," which focused on the first centuries of Byzantium. Preceding the catalogue, 17 essays treat the historical context, religious sphere, and secular courtly realm of the empire, and the interactions between Byzantium and other medieval cultures. Abundantly illustrated. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR