Print Specifics:
- Type of print: Lithograph - Original French antique print
- Publisher: Librairie de Firmin Didot, Paris, Rue Jacob 56, 1885-1887.
- Condition: 1 (1. Excellent - 2. Very good - 3. Good - 4. Fair)
- Dimensions: 11 x 15.5 inches (28 x 40 cm), including blank margins (borders) around the image.
- Paper weight: 2 (1. Thick - 2. Heavier - 3. Medium heavy - 4. Slightly heavier - 5. Thin)
- Reverse side: Blank
- Notes: 1.
Green color 'border' around the print in the photo is a contrasting background
on which the print was photographed. 2. Detail of the print is sharper than the photo of the print.
Legend to the illustrations:
- The
present drawings are tracings of the originals by Nicolas Vassilief, an
engraver from Saint Petersburg who had easy access to the museums and
private collections of the city. According to Russian scholars, native
master craftsmen, free of the exotic influences of the Greeks on the
one hand and the Lombard master builders on the other, could be found
in Russia as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The
Lombards had been called upon by Andrej Georgievitch to build the
Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the city of Vladimir.
In the course of ensuing centuries, similar edifices were built in many
places including in Moscow in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The Mongol invasion impeded relations with the Greek world and the
ensuing isolation appears to have contributed to the originality of
Slavo-Russian ornamentation which resembles neither the Byzantine style
nor its derivative, the Romanesque style. The Celtico-Scandinavian
influence is quite apparent in the documents reproduced here. The
Slavo-Russian signature is, nevertheless, unmistakable in the combining
of interlace and figures, and in the organization and distribution of
these ornaments, so ingeniously and solidly conceived. Indeed, not one
of these motifs lacks logic in its construction: every one of them
could be manufactured. Slavo-Russian manuscripts first appeared in the
eleventh century and were produced until the eighteenth century. The
spontaneous style of Russian ornamentation, however, is limited to the
period between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, before the adoption
of Western taste in the seventeenth century. The specific sources of
the drawings in our plate are unknown but similar ornamentations are
found in religious manuscripts of the fourteenth century.
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