Historiography of Greek Religious Engravings

Abstract

The article presents an overview of the literature on the history of the study of Greek religious engravings. For the first time, there is collected information about the Greek engravings, from the first mentions of them by travelers, to scientific works — monographs, articles, catalogs of collections and exhibitions dedicated to this rare phenomenon of mass religious culture of the 19th century, which has received insufficient attention, especially in Russian literature. This kind of art is quite fully represented in Russian collections, but it remains known only to a narrow circle of specialists. The article presents a systematized review of the world literature, which shows the extent of the study of the topic and opens up space for further research. The article shows the first pre-scientific (empirical) experiments in the description and interpretation of Greek engravings as a special type of church art, mainly Athonite. Further, the author considers the first scientific research and analyzes the monumental works on which all subsequent scientists rely. These are such catalogs as “Paper Icons” by D. Papastratu (in two volumes), “Khilandar Graphics”, “Svyatogorsk Graphics” by D. Davydov. Along with the studies of the main contemporary authors, there are also mentioned studies related to the theme of Greek engraving in an indirect way — those concerning the genesis of the phenomenon of this type of church art. These are studies of proskynetarions, specific engravings and paintings with views of holy places. The article concludes with a historiographic survey of recently published Russian catalogs and studies. This presentation structure corresponds to the task of studying the interest of scientists in this kind of art, identifying scientific problems that attracted researchers in different periods of time.