Saint healers, holy doctors and miracleworkers in iconographic manuals

 

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Two main groups of saints are connected to healing: miracleworkers (Russian chudvotvorcy) and holy doctors (Russian vrachi). Several other terms are used in Slavic synaxaria and iconographic manuals to denote these saints: saint doctors (Russian vrach, bezmezdnyj vrach), saint healers (Russian celebnik, celitel’, celitel’nica) and saints of poverty (Russian bessrebrennik). In many cases these saints are regarded as martyrs, eremites or blessed men. The use of all these terms is not strict or consistent. The selection of saints is depending on the type of manual and its age.

The iconographic manuals usually get information about saints from the synaxaria and similar sources, but not all of the saint doctors present in synaxaria have been moved to the iconographic manuals. Not even all saints known as healers or miracleworkers are regarded as such in the iconographic manuals. Obviously the public interest in certain saints and the practical usefulness of their images influenced the body of the iconographic manuals more than earlier hagiographic tradition.

Nelly Lindgren. International Interdisciplinary Conference: Medieval medicine: Texts, practices, institutions. Rila Monastery, August 29—31, 2000.
University of Sofia, Department of Medieval Slavic Studies, Bulgaria.

 

Rila kloster

This conference aims at uniting scholars working in the fields of medieval medicine and history of healing institutions, cultural history, archeology, linguistics and anthropology.
  Both learned medical practices and popular healing devices will be in the focus of the discussions. Special panels will be organized on medical terminology, problems of distribution of medical texts and their translations, different healing practices, magic and divination, healing prayers and amulets, medieval dietology, medieval baths, role of the monasteries as healing places, monastic medicine and hospitals, cults of saints healers, status of the doctor and the healer.
  Medieval medical texts, practices and institutions in Slavic and Byzantine world, Central Europe, Western Latin, Jewish and Islamic traditions, Armenia, and Georgia are discussed.
  Rila Monastery is one of the greatest monasteries in the Balkans, and one of the most remarkable monuments of Bulgarian art and architecture from the medieval period and the time of Bulgarian National Revival. In 1983 it was included in the UNESCO list of world cultural heritages.

 

Early Christian Saints in Russian Iconographic Manuals

 

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Russian iconographic manuals contain drawings or textual descriptions of the images and compositions and also technical instructions for the icon painter. Russian manuals are divided into two basic types: the pattern-book (licevoj podlinnik) and the text manual (tolkovyj podlinnik). Pattern-books contain the drawings of the motifs with a short commentary in the margins. Text manuals comprise more detailed information about saints, not only on their images but also on biographical details, and therefore constitute a less known part of the hagiographic literature.

The corpus of Russian calendars and Russian iconographic manuals comprised predominantly Byzantine saints. The share of the Byzantine saints in the oldest Russian church calendars from the 13th century is usually about 95%, while the amount of the Russian saints is insignificant. These proportions are about the same until the beginning of the 19th century. However, in local Russian manuals a larger part (50% or more) consists of Russian saints, some of which were not even proclaimed.

Descriptions in text manuals include features as age of a person, shape of hair and beard, kind of clothing, attributes, and colour of important details, but can also include descriptions of landscape, buildings, secondary figures and objects, biographical data and sometimes even a short vita. A comparison of descriptions in manuals of different age shows that some features are constant, while others are slightly varying.

Descriptions demonstrate a great variety of the length and content for different images and motifs. The most important images cover several pages, while descriptions of Russian “new saints” are restricted to a few lines. The length and the content of descriptions were influenced by several factors as type of the motif, type of the manual, age of the manuscript and its geographic attachment.

Text manuals are the result of compilation from many different sources: menologia, synaxaria, hagiographic literature, liturgical books and descriptions of actual paintings. The old classical Byzantine motifs had a long tradition of painting and a great amount of texts to compile. The sources on the “new saints” were poor and often restricted to oral tradition. The principle of the similarity to the archetype inherited from Byzantine aesthetics has got a practical aspect in Russian tradition: the well-known and frequently painted Byzantine saints were used as reference-types or archetypes for the Russian ”new saints”.

 

Nelly Lindgren. International Conference ”Cults of Early Christian Saints from Central and South-Eastern Europe”, Samokov, Sofia, August 22—24, 1999.
Institute of Slavistics ”Vatroslav Jagiã”, Department of Cyrillio-Methodian Studies, University of Sofia.

 

Motivhierarki och färgbeteckningar i ryska ikonmålarhandböcker

 

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Färgbeteckningarna i ryska ikonmålarhandböcker påverkades av de beskrivna motivens typ och innehåll, motivelementens betydelse inom bildens värdehierarki och handskriftens ålder.

Materialet för denna studie utgörs av en rad ikonmålarhandböcker från 1500–1800-talen. Ikonmålarhandböckerna innehåller främst uppgifter om de heliga personer och händelser som visas på ikoner, samt uppgifter om bildens komposition och färger. Beskrivningarna följde alltid ett strikt schema, där vissa uppgifter såsom färg på håret, skägget och kläderna var obligatoriska och markerade personens status. De sekundära detaljernas färg angavs enbart då dessa var viktiga i ett speciell motiv.

Användningen av olika termer för samma färg anger inte enbart färgnyans utan markerar även olika typer av objekt. Exempelvis är vissa termer för röd färg förbehållna tyger och ädelstenar, andra endast för obesjälade föremål, medan övriga används utan begränsningar.

Färgterminologin i målarhandböckerna utvecklades från ett fåtal tekniska termer som angav medlet (pigmentet) till en mångfald beskrivande färgtermer som angav resultatet (en bestämd färgnyans). De nya icke-tekniska, målande, mera nyanserade färgtermerna kom in i målarhandböckerna tillsamman med beskrivningar ur den hagiografiska litteraturen. Färgterminologin i målarhandböckerna var organiserad i ett strikt schemabundet, hierarkiskt uppbyggt system som med obetydliga förändringar bevarades ända fram till 1900-talets början.

 

Nelly Lindgren: Föreläsning för docentur. Stockholms universitet, 11 maj 1998.

 

Colour terminology in Russian iconographic manuals

 

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Three main types of colour terms are defined in Russian iconographic manuals from the 16th –18th centuries: pigment, basic and derivative terms. Proportions of these three types of terms correspond with the age of a manual. In the oldest preserved manuals from the 16th–beginning of the 17th century, the share of pigment terms is about 90 %. In manuals from the middle of the 17th – the 18th century the share of pigment terms is down to about 51 % (in some manuscripts only 16 %) while the share of both basic and derivative terms is increasing. The derivative colour terms constitute only 4 % in manuals from the 16th century; after the middle of the 18th century this group of colour terms dominates /about 56 %).

The number of colour terms in an iconographic manual varies between 15 and 26, which is a tiny part of the total number of colour terms in the contemporary Russian language. In this respect the iconographic manuals are close to the oldest known Russian literary texts from the 11th – 12th centuries, but also to folklore texts.

The analysed material demonstrates how the colour terminology up to the 16tth century developed from early technical terms nominating the substance (the pigment) to terms nominating the goal (the colour). At the next stage in the 16th – 18th centuries, the established terminology expended from the limited number of pigment and basic terms to a larger number of terms with the new derivative terms prevailing over the pigment and basic. These changes were caused partly by the processes in Russian morphology and lexicology, but also by the expansion of the Russian church, and the actual situation of the icon painters

 

Nelly Lindgren, 1997. Cvetooboznachenija v russkikh ikonopisnykh podlinnikakh (istoriko-semanticheskij aspekt). [Ryska, sammanfattning på engelska: Colour terminology in Russian iconographic manuals]. I: Nazwy barw i wymiarów (Colour and measure terms). Stockholm Slavic Papers, 6: 9–23. Stockholm, 1997. ISSN 0347-7002. ISBN 91-7153-605-1.

 

Färgterminologins förändring inom ryskt ikonmåleri

 

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Text för närvarande ej tillgänglig.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nelly Lindgren, 1996. Färgterminologins förändring inom ryskt ikonmåleri. Valör, 1996 (2): 3–19 + 1996 (3): 74–75. Uppsala, 1996. ISSN 0283-751X

 

Greek and Russian Iconographer’s Manuals: Content and Structure

 

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Texten på sidan 159, sidan 160, sidan 161, sidan 162, sidan 163,

sidan 164, sidan 165, sidan 166, sidan 167, och sidan 168.

 

Byzantinoslvica, p. 159–168

 

Nelly Lindgren, 1997. Greek and Russian Iconographer’s Manuals: Content and Structure (På engelska). Byzantinoslavica, 58 (1): 159–168. Prag. ISSN 0007-7712

[Contents in Dialnet; text ej fritt tillgänglig on-line.]

 

From Byzantine to Russian iconographic manuals: structural changes

 

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Iconographic manuals from the Byzantium were the source for the Russian podlinnik.

Entirely technical manuals existed in Byzantium already in the 10th—11th centuries, and later in Europe. However, this kind of manuals did not develop in Russia. The Hermeneia by Dionysius of Fourna represents another kind of Greek manual that contains an iconographic part along with the technical one.

Iconographic manuals from Bulgaria are similar in structure to the Hermeneia.

The Russian podlinnik occurs as an extension of the iconographic part of the Greek manuals. It is usually based on the Orthodox church calendar, not organised thematically as the Greek manuals. The technical part is missing or reduced to short, unsystematic notes.

The corpus of the Russian calendars comprised predominantly Byzantine saints. The share of the Byzantine saints in the oldest Russian church calendars from the 13th century is usually about 95%, while the amount of the Russian saints is insignificant. These proportions are about the same until the beginning of the 19th century.

However, in local Russian manuals a larger part (50% or more) consists of Russian saints, some of which were not even canonised. Different types of Russian manuals developed between the 15th and 18th centuries due to their special and diverse functions for the Russian iconpainters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nelly Lindgren, 1996.From Byzantine to Russian iconographic manuals: structural changes (på ryska, sammanfattning på engelska). I: Byzantium – identity, image, influence. Major papers, sid 272–281. ISBN 87-87879-07-7

XIX International Congress of Byzantine Studies. University of Copenhagen, 18—24 August, 1996. Plenary Session IV, D: The Image and Influence of Byzantium after 1453.

 

En nordrysk ikonmålarhandbok i Sverige

 

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SUMMARY
An extensive Russian manuscript containing the iconographer’s manual (The Royal Library, Stockholm, Acc. No. 1975-116) presents no 502 pages more than 1400 descriptions of saints along with a great number of motives connected to the church feasts. According to linguistic features, orthography, watermarks and content it was written about 1831in Northern Russia, probably near Tikhvin. The present article contains a short palaeographic description of the manuscript and an analysis of its age and palaeographic attachment.

Such manuals including the textual description of the motives are called iconographer’s manuals or iconographic guide s in literature. The second type of the manuals, the one with patterns, or figures, is also called iconographic guide, or figurative iconographic pattern book, or podlinnik in Russian. However, in the Russian tradition podlinniks means any kind of manual, with textual descriptions or with patterns. The most clear terminology is to use the term iconographer’s manual on both types of books (podlinnik in Russian). A text-manual contains the descriptive text (tolkovyj podlinnik in Russian) and a pattern-manual contains patterns (litsevoj podlinnik in Russian).

Linguistic features and other data such as presence or absence of certain saints or the sequence of months in the calendar indicated that the protograph is as old as from the 16th century.

The body of the Orthodox Russian calendars displayed very slight variability until the middle of the 18th century and comprised predominantly Byzantine saints. The service books and calendars became more standardised as a result of the centralization of state and church organisation in Russia along with the spread of printed service books. Many Russian saints canonised in Moscow became known all over the country.

The share of the Byzantine saints in the oldest Russian church calendars from the 13th century is usually about 95% while the amount of the Russian saints is insignificant. In material from the middle of the 19th century the proportions are about the same. The actual manuscript has only 44% Byzantine saints, more than the half are Russian saints. As much as the third part of the Russian saints is from the Northern Russia which confirms the geographic attachment of the manuscript On the other hand the protograph seems to originate from the central parts of Russia, most likely fro Rostov-Suzdal’.

The present article deals with the typology, content and the function of these manuals along with the church-political aspects on their rise. It is based on a series of Russian iconographer’s manuals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nelly Lindgren, 1995. En nordrysk ikonmålarhandbok i Sverige (på svenska, sammanfattning på engelska). Konsthistorisk tidskrift, 64 (4): 241—250. Stockholm. ISSN 0023-3609.

[Buy from: Taylor & Francis Online Journals]

 

Ikonmålarhandböcker som ett nytt arbetsfält inom slavistiken

 

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Ikonmålarhandböcker är en grupp handskrifter som finns på en rad olika språk, bland andra de slaviska språken, och som utgör ett nytt arbetsfält inom slavistiken. Dessa handskrifter är en rik hagiografisk källa som innehåller uppgifter om helgon och motiv som är avbildade på ikoner, samt anvsiningar och råd om målarteknik, färgläggning och disposition.

Det finns två typer av ikonmålarhandböcker: texthandböcker som beskriver och kommenterar ikonmotiv, och förlageböcker som innehåller teckningar och förlagor till ikonmotiv. Texthandböcker på slaviska språk är relativt vanliga, speciellt från 1700-talet och framåt, medan endast en handfull förlageböcker finns bevarade.

På 1990-talet ansågs hagiografi som ett mycket lovande forskningsfält inom slavistik och bysantinologi. En rad stora vetenskapliga projekt initierades för att publicera handskriftsmaterial från olika språk, främst grekiska. Vid Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, startades the Hagiography Database 1998 med en serie floppy diskar men är nu utvecklad som en on-line version.

Under 1990-talet publicerade jag en serie arbeten om ikoner som jag kommer att visa här under rubriken Kristen konst. Den vinjett som håller samman artiklarna är en bild som jag har jag tagit vid Svirskijklostret i Pinega i norra Ryssland. Därifrån kommer också den handskrift som jag bearbetade för min doktorsavhandling 1990.