Keywords
Russian church art of the 18th–19th centuries, church wooden sculpture, Grieving Saviour,
How to Cite
Ryndina A. V. Grieving Saviour in Rrussian carvings of the 18th – 19th centuries: moving from traditions to new solutions // The Art of Eurasia, 2022. № 2 (25). P. 188-203. URL: https://doi.org/10.46748/ARTEURAS.2022.02.019.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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Abstract
The article tries to systematize a great variety of Russian carved images of Christ’s Passion, without delving into detailed analysis of the stylistic characteristics and nuances of the carving, which study seems possible only at the next stage. Among the wooden statues, three main types can be identified: sacral and spatial (Christ in prison), symbolic and liturgical (Grieving Saviour) and, finally, the group most difficult for semantic interpretation, which can conditionally be attributed as historical (Perm sculptures, Christ is depicted in girded garment). Orthodox art is “inseparable from theology” (J. Meyendorff), thus European anthropocentrism and illusionism did not root into Russian ecclesiastical sculpture, despite an unconditional impulse from outside. Wooden sculpture is saturated with liturgical meaning, which always was primordial for Russian church art, and even not eradicated in modern times (P. Muratov considered Russian art to be “unrelenting”). It distanced itself both from Renaissance imitation and from late Gothic and Mannerist mysticism. At the same time, carving has not become just a part of folklore, a folk art, but became an “icon of Christ’s Passion” in the church artwork of the New Age. This is the reason for the deep introduction of the Grieving Saviour image into Russian devoutness, folk poetry and interior church decoration in the 18th–19th centuries up to the Art Nouveau times.
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