The artistic decoration of northern manuscripts

For a long time Russian manuscript book has been famous for its rich artistic design. Miniatures containing parts of liturgical texts, sermons, saints' lives, richly decorated miniatures, initials have changed over time, so they help to date a manuscript. The article studies the artistic design of northern manuscripts in order to figure out a more accurate date of the source. The subjects of the study are liturgical and theological books from the collection of the Arkhangelsk Museum Association “Russian North artistic culture”, created in the XV-XIX centuries. All researched manuscripts are written on paper and all of them are not dated, therefore the date of writing a book is first determined by paper signs, which is then confirmed by other facts, namely by drawings written at the same time as the main text. In “Prologue”, created at the end of the 15th century, the scribe uses the Balkan ornament, which was popular in Russian books of the second half of the 15th and 16th centuries. On the sheets with miniatures there are also large initials of the Balkan type. The “Psalter” of the late 18th century was copied from the printed edition of 1651. It contains the unfinished design of King David copied from the printed edition evidenced by the artist's manner of performing this image. Some of the manuscripts are decorated by scribes with drawings copied or taken from printed editions of the same period as the book. Thus, in the collection of the early XIX century (a “white” date on paper - 1815) there is a miniature that occurs in such printed editions as “The Life of Basil the New”, 1792-1795 and 1801, or “Psalter” 1802-1803, 1812-1814 years. In the collection of the museum there are books consisting of printed and handwritten sheets, restored instead of lost printed ones. For example, in the “Tablet” of Patriarch Nikon, published in 1656, the text was restored by hand on several pages at the beginning of the 18th century that is determined by the paper signs on the pages of the book. On the one of the manuscript sheets there is a miniature taken from a printed source and pasted into the text. Such an ornament is found, for example, in the Minne December 1714. These data show that the handwritten text and design were made at one time. The collection of the museum contains several bright books, richly decorated with Pomor ornament, which was popular in Old Believers' manuscripts written in the Russian North, near the White Sea, in the second half of the 17th and 19th centuries. The Pomor ornament is noted in the books that were created in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is no longer found in manuscripts of late writing, which also indicates that a text and a decor of the book were made the same time. Thereby, the studied material helped to confirm the dates of the creation of the manuscripts, and also showed once again that when the source is dated, all the data in the book are taken into account.

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