Abstract
The Elizabethan Bible (after the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna) is commonly referred to as the Bible, which was edited in preparation for a new edition and first published in St. Petersburg in 1751. The first edition of the codex included only a part of the Synodal project of illustration. The engraved title page and frontispiece with a complex symbolic and allegorical program are considered in this article. Both engravings were created by the masters of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. For the first time, the article publishes archival sources that are important for the interpretation of the iconographic program of engravings. Verbal descriptions (“projects”) were prepared by the Synod for the artist I. E. Grimmel. He made ink drawings based on them. The frame of the title page with the Eagle of Russia, medallions on biblical subjects and panoramas of the Moscow Kremlin and the Peter and Paul Fortress, as well as a portrait frontispiece depicting Empress Elizabeth in front of the sacralized images of her parents Peter the Great and Catherine I are ideologically connected. The heraldic composition of the frame of the title page containing state symbols, and the frontispiece, reminiscent of “allegory for the Succession to the Throne”, glorify in artistic images the “new” God-chosen Russia, raised to an unattainable height by the genius of Peter the Great, and continuing in his “offspring” — daughter Elizabeth, inheriting “the Scepter, the Orb and the Throne of her Father”. The ideological content of the title page and frontispiece of the Elizabethan Bible, as follows from the published archival source, was strictly determined by the Synod. This Synodal program is considered in article in the context of the development of the genre of church panegyric in the first half — middle of the XVIII century.
Published Version
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