Armenian art history

This book contains the lectures concerning the history of the exploration of the  Armenian  medieval art during 1830-1950.It represents the impact of the scholars of different nationalities in the exploration of the Armenian architecture, sculpture, mural painting, manuscript illumination, silverwork and etc

Published in: Études arméniennes contemporaines The Massacres of the Hamidian Period (II): Perceptions and Perspectives

The essay introduces the celebrated nineteenth-century Russian Armenian seascape painter Ivan (Hovhannes) Aivazovsky’s (1817-1900) Massacre of the Armenians in Trebizond in 1895 as one of the most important of the artist’s multifarious responses to the systematic series of massacres unleashed upon the Ottoman Armenian population during 1894-1897. An important document of intellectual engagement with a recorded event of wholesale massacre, the work is presented as an early manifestation of atrocity imagery within an Armenian historical context, radically introducing the representation of violence into an already established Russian Armenian visual taxonomy of Ottoman Armenian victimhood. It is a work that survives only through its mediated reproduction in Russian Armenian lawyer and editor Grigor Djanshiev’s illustrated Russian language Fraternal Help for the Suffering of the Armenians in Turkey, a tome produced to raise funds for the survivors of the mass violence and publicise the events to a wider audience. The essay examines the claim as implied in the work’s caption of the image as truthful depiction of an actual well-documented event, the 8 October 1895 massacre in the eponymous city, and asks whether it represents, rather, an imagined dramatization subordinating human drama to the artist’s customary concern for a Romantic aesthetic. The essay further considers the propagandistic attributes of the work, manifested via its mass circulation and wide dissemination, particularly as incorporated into Fraternal Help.

The French version of an exploration of Armenian manuscript art for a vast exhibition catalogue on the occasion the 500th anniversary of Armenian printing, 1512-2012.  The exhibit was held in the famous Correr Museum in the Piazzo San Marco using book items from its rich collection with loans from the Mekhitarist Brotherhood collection at San Lazzaro in the Venice lagoon and from various collections in Yerevan, Armenia.

The English version of an exploration of Armenian manuscript art for a vast exhibition catalogue on the occasion the 500th anniversary of Armenian printing, 1512-2012.  The exhibit was held in the famous Correr Museum in the Piazzo San Marco using book items from its rich collection with loans from the Mekhitarist Brotherhood collection at San Lazzaro in the Venice lagoon and from various collections in Yerevan, Armenia.  The French version is posted below.

One of the most famous antique carpets, the Dragon and Phoenix rug now in Berlin: Museum fur Islamische Kunst, inventory # I. 4, has been unconvincingly and vaguely attributed to the 15th century as the work of Qaraqoyunlu Turkmen Dynasty.  This is in part due to late 19th and early 20th German scholarship that assumed rugs from the Near East were automatically the work of Islamic craftsmen and women, particularly Turkmen and later Ottoman, but with no precise documentation.  This general undocumented supposition also applied to Oriental carpets depicted in hundreds of Renaissance Italian paintings, although all of them are presented in a Christian context, particular associated with the Virgin Mary.  The author presents firm documentation involving both historical but especially earlier iconographical examples of the dragon-phoenix motif in Armenian art of the late 13th century, borrowed directly from the source of this coupling of animals, China during the Yuan Mongol Dynasty.  He suggests that its most convincing provenance is Armenia perhaps as early as the 14th century.

The infrequent sighting of female nudes in Persian painting quickly has one’s attention. Shortly after the arrival of Europeans to the new capital of Isfahan and the distribution of prints of their engravings in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, we begin to see the emergence of more detailed and realistic Persian female nudes in first the reclining and then the seated positions. This paper will be examining a small group of single-sheet and wall paintings of seated semi-nude female type from Isfahan to find out why and how this motif was adapted to Persian painters’ repertoire. My research reveals how the female seated nude implied a visual understanding and appreciation of European practices and norms, which were channeled by not only the presence of engravings and Europeans themselves, but through Armenian artists with expertise in European mode of painting and knowledge of their cultures from travels and from their shared dwellings in Isfahan’s Armenian quarter of New Julfa.

The history of the Church of St. Mary or literally in Armenian, the Holy Mother of God, Theotokos, the medieval and post medieval Armenian community in Famagusta, Cyprus is presented, hoping it might contribute to the work of preserving and restoring the church and its fresco cycle that miraculously survived centuries of abandonment and neglect. There are no specific records relating to the circumstances or the date of the church’s construction in Armenian sources. Latin documents, however, are quite explicit. According to a papal bull of 1311, the church’s construction had recently started.

This essay examines the manifestation of Realism within the Constantinople Armenian intellectual milieu of the 1880s by delving into the hitherto untested waters of Ottoman visual art production and art criticism. An image and kindred text are closely read and held to mirror major, yet interrelated, concerns of the Constantinople Armenian Realist Generation (Պոլսահայ Իրապաշտ Սերունդ) – the precarious socio-economic and political situation in Ottoman Armenia and the phenomenon of bantkhdoutioun (պանդխտութիւն), the large scale movement of provincial migrant workers from Ottoman Armenia to the imperial capital – and, to reflect upon the manner and avenues of articulation of these concerns under conditions of autocratic rule and increasingly tightening censorship. The essay proposes that an artist’s brush was often able to evade the censor’s scalpel more effectively than the pen, to convey meaning and project allegorical content under the guise of an ethnographic cloak. By extensively drawing upon a wealth of hitherto unutilized Ottoman Armenian sources, the re-introduction and inclusion of diverse silenced voices to complicate the art historiography of the Ottoman Empire is advocated. Through the introduction of some of these voices, this essay hopes to contribute to efforts towards more empirically and methodologically sound, nuanced and inclusive, Ottoman art histories.

After a brief introduction to the work of St. Gregory the Illuminator to convert Armenia to Christianity in the early fifth century, his relics and their reliquaries are discussed in detail. In particular the most important one, the right hand reliquary, or dexter, of which five are known. The two most important are at Holy Etchmiadzin, the Mother Church in Armenia, and with the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia now in Antelias, Lebanon. The article will attempt to explain the important liturgical use of the relics and their individual history.
The document below is composed of pdf of the original type script, followed by the illustration scanned from the publication itself.

This book revue concerns the volume entitled ''Armenian Art Treasures of Jerusalem'' and edited by Bezalel Narkiss.This book is written in collaboration with Michael E. Stone and the historical survey is wriiten by Avedis K. Sanjian.The book is published by Massada Press in 1979.

Even though the printing of books in Armenian began in Venice in 1511/12,
just six decades after Gutenberg’s invention, the hand copying of texts continued
into the nineteenth century. This traditional method of creating books was
carried out in monasteries where the free labour of the monk as scribe was more
economical than the purchased of mass-produced printed books. The fear often
expressed in the West that printing would put scribes and copyists out of work
was also expressed among Armenians. 

Traditional Armenian bindings were fashioned well into the eighteenth century and even occasionally in the early nineteenth century, even in distant Armenian diaspora communities. Even though the physical technique of traditional Armenian bookbinding – the sewing of quires and headbands, the method of attaching the boards, the application of leather covers, and the use of linings – remained unchanged until late, eventually to be replaced at the end of the eighteenth century and after by western bookbinding fashions, the decoration of leather bindings from specific regions undergoes a radical change or changes in the seventeenth century.

The article was one of the keynote addresses at the 13th General Conference of the Association international des études arméniennes (AIEA) held in cooperation with the Matenadaran, the Repository of Ancient Manuscripts, which was responsible for the splendid organization, in Erevan last fall.  The exercise was to imagine how an entire volume devoted to the arts of Armenia, one of a projected seven-volume series for the Armenian component of Brill’s Handbook of Oriental Studies, the first volume of which, Armenian Philology, was published last year.  Among the topics discussed are: How to define Armenian art.  How to treat major and minor arts.  Should modern and contemporary be included, if so how?  How to integrate Armenian art created in the diaspora.  Finally, who is the volume to be directed to?  And how to accommodate specialists and at the same time those with little or no knowledge of Armenian art.

This paper is about the silver cover of the Gospel illustrated in 1598 at Khizan and preserved in Mashtots Matenadaran (No.5576) in Yerevan.For the composition of the Descent from the Cross on the silver cover the unknown Armenian goldsmith have used the engraving made in 1620 at the ''school of the engravers'' of Piter Paul Rubens. That engraving was produced on the base of the Descent from the Cross created by Rubens for th Cathedrale in Antverpen during 1611-1614. This paper  introduces also with the other Armenian artworks that have certain connections with the legacy of Piter Paul Rubens.

A group of seventeen Armenian altar curtains from Holy Etchmiadzin and the Armenian History Museum, Erevan, dating from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, some published for the first time. This was part of a large exhibition held simultaneously at the Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs and the Musée d’Art Religieux de Fourvière, Lyons, during the Year of Armenia in France in 2007. All curtains are illustrated in color. A team of specialists did the notices.

In the surviving corpus of historic Coromandel
Coast trade textiles, a little-known group
of figurative chintzes with Christian
iconography, commissioned as altar curtains
for the Armenian Church, deserves wider
recognition. More than works of Indian textile
art, they are documents of Armenian history
and the global textile trade. The article
surveys their history and use.

This article, a response to Antony Eastmond's monograph Tamta's World, pays particular attention to women's history and identity at the intersection of cultural and religious interactions in medieval Georgia, Armenia, and Anatolia. It highlights the importance of the women in T'amt'a's family-her mother and aunts-in shaping her identity, despite Eastmond's emphasis on the agency of men in this process. I argue that the lives and self-representation of these women were far more relevant to T'amt'a than the numerous examples from various parts of the Islamicate world that Eastmond provides would suggest. The article critically examines the notion of "fluid identities" as applied to the medieval evidence. It does so by considering previous research that has rejected the historicity of Zak'arid/Mxargrʒeli princes' Kurdish origin. Furthermore, it outlines the divergent Armenian and Georgian historiographical traditions on the naming of this dynasty, reveals their sources, and underscores that genealogical constructions and the choice of dynastic monikers were strategies of legitimation. The visual evidence likewise requires nuanced interpretation, as I demonstrate in treating the Axtala Monastery's frescoes. I conclude by emphasizing that research aimed at bridging different disciplines, like Eastmond's, is essential but highly challenging. Its challenges may be partially offset through collaborative efforts among specialists. * I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this article whose comments helped me fine tune the arguments presented here. I am grateful to the journal's superb editing and copy-editing work, a rarity in our age, which has improved the flow and style of writing beyond what I would have otherwise accomplished.

St. Makaravank monastery: the present and the past
Few people know about the existence of St. Makaravank monastery located in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, especially about its history and current situation.
Since 1970s neither art critics nor architects have shown interest in Makaravank monastery and its architecture. Moreover, there is no literature about the monastery.
The visit in March, 2014 sums up the present condition and architecture of the monastery. The history of St. Makaravank is also presented.

This paper is devoted to the study of the Armenian Holy bread seals(also Communion stamps).There is a small group of such stamps, made from wood,  which are preserved in Dudian Diocesan Museum of Bucharest in Romania and most of them can be dated to the XVIII-XIX centuries.