Eastern bestiary of Ural artistic cast iron of the early 20th century

Abstract

The article is devoted to the features of the representation of images of real and fantastic animal worlds, created in the Eastern artistic tradition, in the assortment of the Ural cast iron factories. The question of the reasons for the inclusion of these models in the main assortment of the factories is raised, and also the stylistic correspondence of the models with the leading style of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is revealed. The material of the study is divided thematically into images of representatives of avifauna and images of fantastic animals and amphibians. The analysis of the artworks is accompanied by a consideration of the symbolic meaning of the images in the context of Eastern artistic and mythological traditions. The author defines the features of the models used, as well as the transformation of the oriental prototypes during modelling: endowing objects with functionality, adding individual elements, and others. The analogues of the cast-iron models in the art of China and Japan are highlighted, some of them modified in line with the development of the European art industry. On the basis of the analysis of one of the images, as well as the discovered exact analogue, it is suggested that the Kasli factory could have worked with a real Chinese artwork at the beginning of the 20th century.