Orthodox Churches of Kyiv in Ancient Russian Times: Secular Within the Boundaries of the Canon
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The article analyzes the aspect of the combination of canonical and secular in the ancient Russian churches of Kyiv. The influence of local artistic traditions has been proven by comparing the examples of secular motifs in Byzantine churches and the Hagia Sophia. Orthodoxy in its Byzantine version was brought to the territory with strong pre-Christian beliefs, and despite the fact that the temples conformed to all Christian canons in their appearance, the participation of local masters in the construction contributed to the departure from rigid clichés and the creation of their own regional examples of temple architecture, and not the provincial Byzantine version of temple construction. The purpose of the research was to show and analyze manifestations of secularism in ancient Russian temples, where everything was subordinated to the canon, and to find out where these traditions came from, which were preserved even in Baroque times in the form of portrait galleries of founders. The scientific novelty of the study was as follows: - the application of a systemic approach allowed to consider the image as a whole consisting of separate components and, accordingly, should be analyzed in a number of similar components; - this approach helps to determine the manifestations of originality in the secular wall painting of Kyivan Rus and to determine its differences from Byzantine traditions. The application of the system-structural analysis method made it possible to obtain new results in the study of the well-known topic of the mosaics and frescoes of the Hagia Sophia, since a fundamentally different approach was applied to the analysis of Kyiv and Byzantine samples and their comparison according to the system of indicators: artistic performance technique; the scale of the images and their location in the interior of the temple; plot composition: detailing; polychromy.
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4407641928