Yuri Pyatnitsky

This article discusses a wooden altar cross covered with mother-of-
pearl plaques carved with relief images. The figure of the Crucified Christ is surrounded by four evangelists, at the foot is the skull of Adam; below is Our Lady of Mercy with her heart pierced by a sword. At the top of the cross is a plaque with the monogram of Margarita Alacoque. In the wooden base is a cave where a mother-of-pearl figurine of Christ is placed; Jesus is represented with a burning heart in his hands. On the back of the cross 14 mother-of-pearl medallions symbolize the 14 stops
on the Way of the Cross. Apparently,, the cross was made in the Holy Land and is a pilgrimage relic reminiscent of a visit to Jerusalem. Judging by the analogies, the place of its making was Bethlehem, famous for its wood and mother-of-pearl carvers. The cross dates to the second half or last quarter of the 19th century. The quality of the carving and analogous pieces in Russian museums suggest that the cross was created for a high-ranking traveler from France who visited the Holy Land. This person was an admirer of Margaret Alacoque and the Order of the Burning Heart.

In addition to issues of attribution, this article touches on such various aspects as the use of olive wood for souvenirs, features of the iconography of the Crucifixion, Orthodox and Catholic chapels at Golgotha, and the theme of Christ – the Holy Burning Heart.

This article examines three icons of the Virgin and Child, one in a private collection in Athens, the second in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the third in the Museum of Early Byelorussian Art in Minsk. The latter was unfortunately stolen from the Minsk museum recently. The icon in the Athens collection bears the signature of Nikolaos Lamboudis from Sparta. This is the only known signed work by the master. Unfortunstely we have very little historical information about this artist. He is thought to have come from the Lamboudis family known since the 14th century in the Peloponnese. Another member of this family, Matfeos Lamboudis from Peloponnesos,
worked in Florence and Ferrara in the 15th century. Only documents can authenticate attributions to Nikolaos Lamboudis, of course. Yet art historians
do not doubt that he worked in the 15th century. The Greek scholar Mourtali Acheimastou-Potamianou believes that the Athens icon was painted by Nikolaos Lamboudis a little after the middle of the 15th century.
On the basis of a comparative iconographical and stylistic analysis, the author concludes that the two other icons: from the Hermitage and the Museum of Early Byelorussian Art in Minsk, may be connected with the circle of Nikolaos Lamboudis. He also draws attention to the heightened individualisation of the master's style, finding a parallel to this in works of the late 14th and first half of the 15th century. In such icons as the "Virgin of Tenderness" from the Annunciation Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin (late 14th-early 15th cent.), the "Virgin of the Don" by Theophanes the Greek, and the work of Andrei Rublev he detects the same tendency towards heightened individualism. He therefore considers it possible to date the icon from the circle of Nikolaos Lamboudis to the first half, most likely towards the middle, of the 15th century.

In 2019, the State Hermitage Museum acquired three carved wooden eulogia, which are being introduced in this article to the scholarly community. The author’s research led him to the conclusion that eulogia were carved in the Holy Land in the 19th century, most probably, in Jerusalem. This suggestion is indicated by the word Jerusalem in Hebrew, inscribed in ink on wood and varnished. The author pays special attention to the symbolism of the olive tree, from which these objects were made, discusses an issue of “historical materials” for making pilgrimage souvenirs, and compares the Hermitage eulogia with bread stamps.

This article precedes The Tsargrad Collection of Papers and, to a certain extent, is a programme article. It recounts how and when the tradition of publishing collections of scholarly articles in connection to the International Congresses of Byzantine Studies began in the State Hermitage Museum; the collections of articles published previously are listed, and the events related to the decision to change the place of the congress from Istanbul to Venice and Padua are described; the name of the Hermitage volume – The Tsargrad Collection of Papers is explained. From approximately 2005–2006, there have been tendencies to politicise Russian Byzantine studies of the 19th – first half of the 20th century, to present prominent Russian Byzantinists exclusively as representatives of the ‘imperial ambitions of Russia’, and their academic works as a political order of the tsarist government. These forced the author to look into the history of the Byzantine heritage in Russia and into the history of the study of Byzantine culture in general. In connection to it, the role of Catherine the Great and her grandchildren, Alexander I and Nicholas I, is discussed in the context of the Oriental policy of Russia. Such an essay is necessary in order to understand more objectively the formation of the museum collections, the period, and the reasons the scholarly studies of Byzantine culture began in Russia.

This article introduces, for the first time, watercolours and drawings by the artist and architect Nikolay Borisovich Baklanov that were made during his participation in the Trabzon expedition in the summer of 1917. The State Hermitage acquired them from its rightful heiress in 2019–2021. For various reasons, Baklanov’s pictorial works were not added to the fund of the Trabzon expedition kept in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. Therefore, they are of great scholarly interest. Besides thirteen full-scale watercolours of ancient monuments of Trabzon, including a unique depiction of frescoes of the Palace Church in the Citadel and two friendly caricatures, the article also publishes three watercolours of Armenian monasteries of Haghpat and Sanahin, which the artist created after the end of the expedition, before his return to Moscow. Also reproduced are four ink drawings made by Baklanov in 1919 in Moscow for an unrealised publication on the monuments of Trabzon. The article provides a detailed account of the reasons and circumstances of the formation of the Trabzon expedition, its participants, working conditions, and goals, as well as the results and significance of the expedition materials. In addition, Nikolay Baklanov’s reproduction of several drawings and watercolours from a private collection in an article and a monograph about the Trabzon expedition written by Anna Tsypkina were subjected to critical analysis.

The article continues the authors’ study series of a group of long-edged weapons from the collection of the State Hermitage museum, which decorative schemes include Christian images.
The article deals with a saber ornamented with an image of St. George. The saber entered the Imperial Hermitage museum in 1885-1886 as a part of the Arse-nal of Tsarskoye Selo collection. The saber used to belong to the Grand Duke Mi-khail Pavlovitch, who bought it in the city of Brailov (the nowaday Brail city in Romania) during the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-1829.
The saber blade was made of high quality crucible steel and represents the type of Ottoman kilij, dating back to the middle of the 18th century. This dating is supported by the ornamentation of the blade. The further analysis of the saber brought the authors to the conclusion that some of its elements, inscriptions and figures were made in different periods of time and, probably, in different regions.
On the one side of the blade an Arabic inscription “There is no hero like Ali. There is no sword like Zhu-l-Fakar” was inlayed. The technique the inscription was worked in differs from the decorations of the opposite side of the blade that testifies these decorative schemes to have been made in various time spans.
The manner the image of “St George the dragonslayer” was executed in and the latinized variant of the inscription also point that these elements were add-ed later on demand of a new owner of the saber. The scene of St. George’s slaying the dragon, most probably, was inspired not only by the Christian church tradition of this Saint veneration, but the folk ballads, legends and fairy tales about George the hero, which were very popular on the Balkans, especially in Romania.
All these data and the provenance of the saber from the Romania fortress of Brailov suggest this very region to be the place where the image of St. George was made in.

Georgian art in the Hermitage Museum: the history and
                              study of the collection
This article offers an overview of the history of the formation of the collection of Georgian medieval art in the State Hermitage Museum. Particular attention is paid to the history of its study and exhibition. These are examined in the context of the establishment of procedure of museum work in the Hermitage in the 1920s-1970s. Also explained are the complex relations between curators, the head of the Oriental Department, Academician I.A. Orbeli and the outstanding scholar L.A. Matsulevich. Attention is given to the history of an exhibition made in connection to the Third International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology held at the Hermitage in 1935; to the permanent gallery of the Oriental Department which lasted from 1935 to 1941; to the new principles of presentation of museum objects implemented in the 1950s. The author notes the revival of scholarly contacts between the Hermitage and Georgian scholars in the second half of the 2010s.

The icon known among pilgrims as "The Topo­graphy of Palestine" is painted on canvas. The piece discussed in the article is held by the Hermitage and dates from 1876. It presents the Great Church on Golgotha in Jerusalem and other Holy Places of pilgrimage. Thirty one separate scenes are included into the composition of the icon.
Analysis of the scenes, their arrangement and selection of the details allowed the author of the article come to a conclusion that the composition of "The Topography of Palestine" is based on a precise structure worked out during centuries. It is logically strict and connected with topography of the places of worship and traditional pilgrimage routes. Several scenes of the Last Judgement and expiation were usually placed in the upper part of an icon. Pictures­que icons, though lacking high artistic value, were widely demanded by pilgrims. At the same time, icon painters used to stick to the truth in rendering the details, which helps us consider such icons as a valuable source for the studies in culture of the Holy Land. Certain subjects are discussed by the author of the article in comparison with the pilgrim, mainly Russian, memoirs of Middle Ages and the 19th century.

The first literary adaption of the legend of 'The Seven Sleepers of Ephesos' was given in the texts of the Syrian authors - Monophysites of the Vth-VIth centuries. The legend firmly entered Orthodox Martyrologia and became widely known in the Latin Church since the VIth century. An episode about 'Sleepers' is mentioned in the I8th sura of the Koran and thus was often illustrated in Moslem Art. The fact that Ephesos was situated on the road of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, played an important role in the popularity of the cult of 'The Seven Sleepers of Ephesos'. In the ancient Russian pilgrimage literature there is a very informative description of Ephesos and its holy places at the beginning of the XIIth century. At that time the cave of the 'Seven Sleepers' became one of the religious centres of Ephesos; items of art and handicrafts testify to this fact. In Byzantine art the image of the 'Seven Sleepers' was known since the Iconoclasm period. It appears very frequently in illuminated Psalters near the text of Psalm 32. On the other hand, churches were only rarely decorated with images of the 'Seven Sleepers'. The representation was usually placed in the narthex or in the prothesis where it stands in connection with the theme of Commemoration of the deceased and the Resurrection of the body. In Postbyzantine decorations the scene is located among others from the Menologia for October. It is difficult to imagine that any icons with this topic existed in Byzantium, and if so those could only belong to the Postbyzantine period.

The publications of objects from the collection of Oriental silver in the State Hermitage Museum rarely include a professional expertise on their making. The few exceptions are the works of R.F. Minosyan and, especially, B.I. Marshak, in which techniques used by craftsmen were taken into account in the attribution and dating the objects. In several articles Marshak discussed a plate found in 1880 near the city of Irbit, the Perm Province; he dated it to the 12th century and considered it as a product of one of the workshops which existed in the territories of the Crusaders in northern Syria.
The use of modern instruments and research methods makes it possible to return once again to the technical ex-pertise of the place. Such expertise was done at the State Hermitage, in the Laboratory for Scientific Restoration of Precious Metals. This article offers the results of the study, and stresses the necessity of similar expertise for the objects that display stylistic parallels with the Irbit plate, namely Wawel’s casket in Krakow, and a bowl from Rzhyshchevo (now in Kiev), as well as two less artistic bowls of the 12th century – one with an image of an allegoric personage from the Yamal-Nenets District Museum, and the one from Arilje, Serbia.

In the article written by the epigraphist Andrey Vinogradov he examines two editions of the State Hermitage: the catalogue of the temporary exhibition (2000) "Sinai, Byzantium and Russia" and the catalogue collection "Monuments of Byzantine Applied Arts 4th – 7th Centuries" (2006).
We, the authors of these two editions (Vera Zalesskaya and Yury Pyatnitsky), consider it our duty to express our attitude, on the one hand, to the unproved accusation of non-correct translation of the Greek and Latin inscriptions, and, on the other, to demonstrate the incompetence
of the reviewer himself both in material paleography and in the contemporary state of some historical events (for instance, the history of Great Bulgaria in the seventh century).
The review is written in the language unbecoming in academic society and is abound in incorrect and boorish expressions.

Restoration and attribution of The Virgin of Tenderness
(a new acquisition of the Byzantine collection of the Hermitage Museum)

After the once mighty Byzantine Empire ended its existence in 1453, the masters of the local artistic
schools from diff erent regions of the former empire preserved and developed the traditions of Byzantine icon painting, enriching them with contemporary innovations in both iconography and technique. These post-Byzantine traditions have continued to live up to the present, as shown, for example, in works of the remarkable Greek artist Manolis Betinakis.

In the history of post-Byzantine icon painting from the second half of the 15th century until the 21st, the period of the mid - second half of the 19th century is among those that did not attract much attention of art historians. For fine art connoisseurs, icons of this period were works of practically contemporary painters, and, as a result, the Hermitage Museum, whose icons collection has been formed solely out of acquisitions of private, museum, and state collections, possessed only a few works of Greek and Balkan workshops. During the last decade, the purchase
of icons from private persons, this lacuna became fi lled with interesting works made at Mount Athos, Palestine, the Balkans, and Ionian islands.

One of these icons, The Virgin of Tenderness, was acquired in 2013. The icon depicts the waist-high Virgin Mary holding the Child cuddled up with the cheek to the Virgin’s face. Two life-size fi gures of Archangels Michael and Gavriil are placed in the upper corners; they crown the Virgin with one hand and hold the gold medallions with black monograms of Her name in the other, “МР ӨY”. White letters “M” and “G” are visible over the gold halos of archangels. On the background, to the right from the fi gure of the Child, there are white monograms “IC XC”.

The icon had some significant losses of coating and paint, a vertical crack, and chips. Taking into account that in the 19th century the artists often applied “atypical” materials experimenting with water solvent paints and varnishes, the restoration committee decided to use the case for the development of the methodology and choice of optimal materials for the restoration of Greek icon painting of the mid - second half of the 19th century.

The Hermitage icon bears many features typical for the late Greek and Balkan painting. From the traditional iconographic type of The Virgin of Tenderness, well-known in Byzantine art from the 7th century, the icon differs by the pose of the Child and position of hands of the Virgin. By its composition and iconographic details the icon finds numerous parallels in works of Bulgarian masters of the 19th century.

According to the results of the technical expertise of the pigments used and iconographic parallels, the icon was painted in the mid-19th century in one of the local workshops of the Balkan Peninsula.

Byzantine micromosaics from the collection of Alexandre Basilewsky in the State Hermitage Museum, Sankt-Petersburg

This article discusses two micromosaics from the Byzantine collection of the State Hermitage Mu­seum. In the 19th century, they belonged to Alexandre Basilewsky, the famous Russian art collector and connoisseur who lived in Paris. In 1884, Basilewsky's collection was acquired for the Hermita­ge by the Emperor Alexander II.

Micromosaics are regarded as one of the finest pieces of Byzantine art. Only about 25 similar objects have been preserved in the world's museum. The State Hermitage possesses three of these icons, two of which are connected with the collecting activities of Alexandre Basilewsky. Both mi­cromosaics are productions of the Constantinople's Court workshop. One of them, which the au­thor dated to the first quarter of the 14th, century, represents St Theodore Stratelates. An analysis of various sources suggests that it is exactly this mosaic that was mentioned in the registry of gifts presented at the end of the 1511, century by Cardinal Basilios Bessarion to the Peter's Holy See. It is suggested that it came to France during the Napoleonic Wars. Before the mosaic was purchased by Basilewsky, it belonged to de Nolivo.

The second mosaic, dated to the end of the 13th or early 14th century, bears the image of St John the Baptist. A thorough analysis of the traces from silver plaques and lazuli cubes left in wax paste has made it possible for the author to read the name of the depicted saint. For some unknown reasons, since the second half of the 19'h century the saint on this mosaic was identified as the Prophet Samuel. In fact, the icon depicts St John the Baptist that confirm fragments of the inscrip­tion, iconography, and a traditional type of the saint. Around 1864, the Louvre's restorer Alfred Corplet removed the mosaic from its wooden base and placed it on a slate plate; in the same way he conserved the famous icon Transfiguration of Jesus, at the Louvre.

Besides tracing the history of the Hermitage mosaics and their provenance, identifying the depi­cted images, the technique with which the mosaics were made, and their dating, the article also raises an important issue on how these art objects that have undergone restoration should be treated  as forgeries or as originals.

AN ELEVENTH-CENTURY ILLUMINATED GREEK PSALTER
AT THE HERMITAGE MUSEUM (acc. no. BBСЕ-1309)

A small illuminated Greek Psalter, which is housed in the Byzantine Collection of the Hermitage Museum, was undoubtedly executed in one of the best Constantinopolitan scriptoria in the last quarter of the eleventh century. All aspects of the manuscript’s execution, such as its high quality parchment, superb calligraphy and exquisite decoration, indicate that the Psalter was commissioned by a highranking member of Byzantine society. Until 1945 the Psalter was kept in the University Library in Berlin and was known to scholars under the call number 3807. The manuscript was thought to have perished at the end of World War II, but, in fact, it was brought to the Soviet Union as part of extensive reparations. After the war the Psalter was not available to scholars, and a description published in 1933 by George Stuhlfauth was the only source of information about this manuscript. Since Stuhlfauth’s
description scholars of Greek paleography, codicology and art history have made significant progress in the study of manuscripts, and our use of contemporary advances has been fruitful in evaluating and supplementing previous findings and conclusions about this remarkable Psalter.
In this article the authors describe and analyze the Hermitage Psalter, applying modern criteria and techniques, such as the Leroy classification of ruling patterns and systems and the identification of the scribe’s handwriting to locate and date the codex. We contend that this Psalter was executed in a Constantinopolitan workshop (ergasterion) in the last quarter of the eleventh century by anonymous
craftsmen, a scribe and an illuminator, who probably executed several other Gospels and Psalters – for
example, Athens, National Library of Greece, MS Constantinopolitanus Metochii Sancti Sepulcri 375
and MS 57; St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, gr. 214; and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 320 and Vat. gr. 342. Codex Metochii Sancti Sepulcri 375 was executed in 1077–1078 for the renowned historian and patrician Michael Attaliates, and the St Petersburg codex gr. 214 was commissioned by the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Dukas (reigned 1071–1078).
The authors plan to publish a detailed description and analysis of the Hermitage Psalter in a monograph dedicated exclusively to this exceptional manuscript and its extraordinary history.

A PRECIOUS BOOK COVER OF THE FOUR GOSPELS FROM THE VARDZIA MONASTERY

Rare are art objects of medieval Georgia attracted attention not only of scholars and art lovers but selfish antiquarians and collectors as well. There are known cases when in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the treasuries in Georgian monasteries were plundered. Especially attractive for robbers were cloisonné enamels that decorated revetments of many celebrated icons. For personal gain antiquarians did not even spare the famous Virgin of Khakhuli from the Gelati Monastery. Another famous and precious relic of Georgian kings was also kept in Gelati – the Four Gospels from the  Vardzia Cave Monastery. It once belonged to Queen Tamar, but in the sixteenth century the forces of a Persian ruler seized it during the destruction of Vardzia and the Four Gospels was taken to Iran.  The pages’ margins bear historical inscriptions made in different centuries that reflect the history of the creation and existence of this manuscript. No less valuable was also the cover of this manuscript decorated with gold repoussé plaques and two cloisonné enamels. In the 1880s, this precious cover was taken off the manuscript and later came to the collection of Ivan Balashev, a Kamerger of the Imperial Court. Balashev dismantled the enamels of St Demetrios Orant and
The Enthroned Virgin with Archangels, and a number of times lent them to exhibitions and publications. The enamels were studied by the art historians Nikodim Kondakov and Nikolai Makarov, among others. Ivan Balashev bequeathed his collection of enamels to the Hermitage. Despite this, in the 1920s both enamels from the cover of the Vardzia Four Gospels happened to be on auction in Germany. The plaque with St Demetrios Orant, that is considered one of the best Byzantine cloisonné enamels of the eleventh century, was bought by the Kunstgewerbemuseum Museum in Berlin, where it is still kept. The second plaque, with the image of the enthroned Virgin (produced in the twelfth century in a Georgian workshop) ended up in the in the collection of Alfred Stokle in Brussels, and disappeared after his death; it is most likely in the possession of Stokle’s descendants, in Switzerland.
The fate of the Gospel’s cover with gold repoussé plaques remained unknown, and for years it was believed that it has been lost forever. In 2001, I discovered this rare object in the collection of the Hermitage Research Library, and now it is among the best exemplars of Byzantine art collection in the Museum. The article discusses in detail the many turns of fate in the story of the Vardzia Gospel; provides information on the cave monastery itself; suggests a new attribution of the Gospel. The author also discusses in detail the repoussé gold plaques that he dates to the end of the 11th-first years of the 12th century, and attributes the work to the court jewelers of Queen Tamar. No less attention is paid to the two enamels – the Byzantine and the Georgian one. Thus, the study shines a light on the fate of the Vardzia Gospel and its cover, from the moment of its creation till the present. Also, the article offers an analysis of the artistic elements of all components comprising this precious cover.

In 2011, a monograph long anticipated by art historians with an expertise in Old Russian and Byzantine art was published by Ljudmila Pekarska. The main subject of the monograph – the history of a hoard of jewellery found in Kiev in 1906, and as luck would have it is today divided between the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The author, however, did not limit her study to the analysis of objects from this hoard. She used an extensive amount of comparative materials from collections in many Western, Ukrainian, and Russian museums. L. Pekarska focuses mainly on the cloisonné enamels, an impressive example of exquisite medieval luxury. Welcoming
the publication of this book, and being interested in the research, as well as its author, I do not envy the hard work that it would take for a person to write a scholarly review on this publication. The book contains so many specific features, so many politicized statements, so many altered facts that an unprepared reader, and even a professional, will not always be able to understand these “sleights of hand”. For this reason, I chose only three pages from the book of Ljudmila Pekarska that discuss a collection of cloisonné enamels of Alexandr Zvenigorodsky and its fate
(now almost the entire collection is kept in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). I hope that my article will help the reader in understanding the nuances of L. Pekarska’s book and, besides that, off ers the reader more detailed information about the unique collection of Zvenigorodsky and the reasons it is now in Western museums. In this article, the author includes biographical facts about Alexander Zvenigorodsky; it shines a light on the history of Zvenigorodsky’s ownership of the cloisonné enamels, and criminal origin of the collection taken from Georgian monasteries.
Also included is information on the publication of the collection by its owner – the famous book issued in three languages
in 200 copies each: in Russian, in German, and in French. The book has long since become a rare example of the highest quality of printing and refi ned luxury. A considerable attention is paid to the fate of the collection after the death of its owner; the reason it was secretly sold to John Pierpont Morgan; a negative role in this sale of the infamous collector Michail Botkin. A seemingly private matter about Zvenigorodsky’s collection of enamels has raised numerous problems of ethical, methodological, and, in some degree, even cultural and political nature.