Form Of Paintings Research Articles

On a Source of the “Byzantine Project” by Prince Grigory Gagarin: Dominique Papety

The article is devoted to the work of the French artist Dominique Papety, whose copies of Mount Athos paintings served as one of the sources of the “Byzantine project” of Prince G.G. Gagarin, who later became vice-president of the Imperial Academy of Art and who strived to revive the “national” ecclesiasti cal art in Russia. The analysis of Papety’s works and of his views on art shows that in his religious works the art ist was inspired by the art of the remote past - in par ticular, that of Byzantium, while in his secular paintings he followed the painters of late Renaissance - Rapha el’s third manner, Titian, Michelangelo, Paolo Veronese, Bellini, Francia. Special attention is paid to the art ist’s travel to Mount Athos, undertaken by him in 1847 under the impression of the Athos manuscript with in structions for icon-painters that had been published two years earlier by A.N. Didron, an archaeologist. The cop ies of the frescoes by Panselinos, a Greek painter of the 12th century (according to Mt Athos monks), that were made by Papety at Mount Athos, show the impact of academic education on the French artist, who per fectly mastered the “plasticity” of form in pain ting. This feature of Papety’s copies allows the author of this ar ticle to conclude that, for Gagarin, they must have be come a visible demonstration of the fruitfulness of com bining the “Greek Christian thought” with the “Greek pagan form”. The idea of this combination was subse quently used by Gagarin to revive the “national style” in church paintings.

War and representation: humanism in German painting, 19457

The broadly held perception that Germany's 1950s economic regeneration was a catalyst for its cultural recovery has been reinforced unduly within a historiography emphasizing art's re-emergence after 1945 through the achievements of artists in the West at the expense of their eastern counterparts, whose contributions were seen as devalued by being politically compromised. Such narratives overshadow the achievements of German painters who tried to discover a renewed purpose for art by salvaging a humanist tradition from the moral and physical wreckage of Nazism. This revealed conflicts between those seeking to maintain continuities with Germany's past, and those viewing 1945 as a decisive break with history. This article suggests that the humanist themes they invoked provide another context for continuing debates around memory, suffering, guilt, blame and reconciliation. In that sense, humanism transcended the schisms that emerged over painting's form and content and whether to remould art along socialist lines or to restore more liberal and elitist principles.