The Unknown Provincial Church Murals of the XIX - early XX Centuries Painted after the Famous Metropolitan Patterns

На примере неизвестных церковных росписей в статье анализируется восприятие прославленных столичных произведений в провинции. Значительный объём фактического материала по церковным росписям, накопленный за время экспедиционных поездок в регионы России, позволил сделать некоторые обобщающие заключения по поводу интереса регионального церковного искусства к творчеству столичных мастеров. Рассмотрен процесс усвоения отечественного академического наследия через отдельные картины, росписи и иконы, выбор которых отразил религиозное мировоззрение заказчиков и художников в ряде губерний Центральной России - Владимирской, Калужской, Рязанской и Тверской. Провинциальные церковные мастера решали сложнейшие художественные задачи перевода станковых картин в статус монументальной живописи, а конкретнее - графических произведений в архитектурные формы. Перевоплощение образца из отдельной работы в часть архитектурного пространства заставляет говорить о провинциальных росписях на темы известных столичных произведений как на художественный феномен. Ряд провинциальных памятников впервые введён в научный оборот. В статье выявлены столичные произведения, получившие наибольшее распространение в провинции. An article provides an analysis of some renowned metropolitan masterpieces in provincial interpretations using several unknown church murals as an example. It studies a process of adoption illustrated in Russian academic heritage by a considerable number of paintings, murals and icons. A significant amount of factual material on church paintings, accumulated during expeditionary trips to the regions of Russia, made it possible to draw some general conclusions about the interest of regional church art in the work of the leading capital masters. The selection of works reflected the customers and painters’ religious outlook in several Central Russia, mainly in Vladimir, Kaluga, Ryazan and Tver, provinces. Provincial church artists solved the most complex artistic task of translating easel paintings into the monumental ones or, literally, graphic works into architectural forms. The transformation of a separate piece of work and incorporating it into architectural space let us talk about provincial replicas of famous capital works as an artistic phenomenon. The author introduces some provincial monuments into a scholarly circulation and brings to light the metropolitan works of art, which were widely spread in province.

Uncovering Mussolini and Hitler in Churches: The Painter's Ideological Subversion and the Marking of Space along the Slovene-Italian Border

This study analyzes the phenomenon of church paintings as subversive visual representations of Fascism and as an act of systematic rebellion against Fascist “ideological marking of space.” Slovene Expressionist painter and sculptor Tone Kralj's (1900−75) paintings functioned as ideological markers of national territory. He painted churches along the ethnic border as it was imagined by the Slovene community, delineating it with visual symbols of anti-Fascism and anti-Nazism. Kralj's undertaking can thus be interpreted as an instance of systematic “subversive coverage” of an ethnically exposed borderland with church paintings. Even today, his artistic “delineation” of the then-disputed ethnic border is a marking phenomenon that cannot be found anywhere else in Europe. If one of the most important authorities on Fascist ideology in Italy, Emilio Gentile, considers Fascist ideology to be a form of political religion and a modern manifestation of the sacralization of politics, then Tone Kralj's church paintings could be regarded as an instance of systematic introduction of the political and ideological into the religious context. Perhaps the most ingenious feature of Kralj's ecclesiastical art is his fusion of Catholicism with the Slovene national idea for the purpose of ideologically marking and promoting anti-Fascism and anti-Nazism as well as Slovene nationalism and Slovene irredentism in the Julian March.

The Resurrection of the Body

This article analyses visual and written materials which indicate some of the interesting changes that the authoritative, Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection underwent in modernity. These materials document a growing gap between the authoritative creed and people’s beliefs, which cannot, I argue, be attributed solely to intellectual changes, but which was also highly reliant on changes in material living conditions and medical and hygienic progress. The article suggests that the belief in the resurrection of the body was quite firm in the general population even in the eighteenth century - the century of the Enlightenment, but that it faded towards the end of the nineteenth century due to changes in the material life conditions, such as medical progress and a decline in child mortality. My sources are gathered from the predominantly Lutheran former Duchy of Schleswig, and particularly from northern Friesland, and consist of personal letters, sermons, and visual sources such as church paintings and gravestone images. By means of selected examples, I investigate what the authoritative dogma of belief in the resurrection of the body meant to ordinary people. I trace the causes of this belief, and I discuss why it faded towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Women’s Dress in Sixteenth-Century Sweden

This essay presents an overview of women’s fashions in sixteenth-century Sweden, which at the time included present-day Finland. Aristocratic fashions and the manners of dress of the people are considered, using documentary, visual and material sources from the period such as sumptuary laws, inventories, church paintings, portraits, woodcuts and surviving garments.

Bede and the church paintings at Wearmouth–Jarrow

Bede's remarks about the paintings placed by Benedict Biscop in his twin Northumbrian monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow have often been quoted, but I do not think they have ever been examined or analysed with the full attention they deserve. It is my purpose to provide such an examination here, in the hope of shedding some further light on this subject and also of correcting the misconceptions that have gained currency. Bede's allusions to the paintings occur in only two of his works, the Historia Abbatum and his homily on Benedict Biscop. He does not mention them in his Ecclesiastical History. The only other contemporary references occur in the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, but it is so brief that it can be omitted from our discussion. The most important source is unquestionably the Historia Abbatum.