Valeria Kuvatova

Russian Academy of Sciences | RAS

The question of semantic connections between Early Christian funerary art and texts of Early Christian prayer for the dead – Ordo commendationis animae – remains controversial. Some scholars endorse the idea that iconographic programs of Roman catacombs and Early Christian sarcophagy can be traced back to the prayer. Others highlight the distinctio...

The subject of the study – the phenomenon of cultural appropriation of Ancient pagan iconography by Early Christian art – is approached through the funerary art of Ptolemaic Egypt. The study aims at tracing back the origin of an important Early Christian scene – Jonah under the Gourd Vine – by methods of semiotic analysis and historical contextuali...

The rock-hewn church Abuna Yemata Guh, situated in the Gheralta Mountains of the Ethiopian Tigray region, houses one of the best preserved and least studied wall paintings of medieval Ethiopia. The pictorial program is dated to the second half of 15th century, by stylistic and iconographic characteristics. In fact, no well-proved date has been sugg...

The sophisticated iconographic program of a small Early Christian mausoleum (the so-called Exodus Chapel) in the outskirts of the Kharga Oasis (Egypt) has long been under the scrutiny of scholars. While some of the scenes of the program are conventional for the Early Christian funerary art, the other seem rather unusual. Moreover, they are not easi...

The Chapel of Exodus is a small Coptic mausoleum located in the outskirts of the oasis of Kharga in Libyan Desert (Egypt). It is famous for its elaborated pictorial program which is loosely dated back to the late 4th through the early 5th century A.D. While its figure paintings have long been under the academic scrutiny, the decorative program has...

The famous tomb of Petosiris (a high priest of Thoth) in the Tuna al Gebel necropolis on the outskirts of the Middle Egyptian town of Hermopolis Magna is dated by the last quarter of the 4th c. bc. The pictorial program of the tomb, decorated with painted reliefs, has no known parallels in Ptolemaic art. In terms of iconography and style the relief...

While the Ethiopian Christian iconography relies on two major artistic traditions—Byzantine and Western European, the iconography of infernal demons was inspired specifically by Western European art. The Ethiopian tradition has developed four basic iconographic types of demons, each going back to different artistic schools, both in terms of place o...

The article is focused on the semiotic aspect of the gene-sis of the Early Christian art. The process of its formation is analyzed through various types of connections be-tween the Early Christian visual signs and their respec-tive theological ideas/mental images. These connections manifest the typological features of the Early Christian art.