Christian Art in D.V. Aynalov’s Legacy of the Kazan Period

Abstract

D.V. Aynalov (1862—1939), a Russian Byzantinist, art critic and historian of Russian art, during his years at Kazan University (1890—1903) studied the issues of ancient Christian culture. For the first time, the article involves Aynalov’s newly studied iconographic heritage, which allows describing the creative laboratory of the Byzantinist and his original method of analyzing monuments. The author finds that the development of a new research methodology was facilitated by the expansion of the empirical base, which, in addition to apocryphal texts, included Aynalov’s own drawings, and photographs of monuments made by order of the scientist. In the article, D.V. Aynalov’s lectures on “Ancient Christian Art” are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, allowing to reveal the argumentation of the scientist’s main idea about the connection between the late Antique style and early Christian art. Aynalov made two important discoveries in the history of Christian art. The first discovery was that, using the example of the mosaics of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Aynalov managed to identify an important moment in the transformation of the image of the Virgin Mary into the image of the royal Virgin. The second discovery was the transformation of the symbolic image of Christ in the form of a lamb into the image in the form of a man, using the example of the mosaics of Albenga. The implementation of a comprehensive interpretation of Aynalov’s iconographic heritage in the context of his ideas allows us to understand the scientist’s system of evidence and reveal his original concept of the development of Christian art in the West and East. His research made a significant contribution to the new concept of the universal history of art, in which a special place belonged to Byzantium, and later to ancient Russian art. Aynalov’s works contributed a great deal to the development of the scientific base on Christian art, art history and Byzantine studies in Kazan. The republication of D.V. Aynalov’s legacy of the Kazan period is of interest for both modern Byzantine studies and the history of cultural studies.