Alexei Lidov
Encyclopedia
Alexei Mikhailovich Lidov (Russian:
Алексей́ Михай́лович Ли́дов) is a Russia
n art historian
and byzantinist
, an author of the concept hierotopy
.
on March 9, 1959. His father, Mikhail Lidov, was a Russia
n space scientist; his mother, Diana - a mathematician
. Upon the graduation from the department of art history
of the Moscow State University
in 1981, his first appointment was at the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow. He earned a Ph. D. in art history from the Moscow State University in 1989. In 1991 he founded the Research Center for the Eastern Christian Culture, an independent non-governmental organization, and has worked as its director. In 2008—2009 he served as the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Art. Since 2010 he also works at the Institute of World Culture as director of research. Lidov has lectured at Princeton
, Harvard
, Columbia
, Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne universities et al. He initiated several research programs and organized nine international symposia on iconographical
and hierotopical
subjects.
art history
. While working as a researcher at the State Museum of Oriental Art, he studied the Christian art of Armenia
and Georgia
. Building upon the material of his Ph.D.
thesis, he published in 1991 his first book about the mural paintings of the Akhtala monastery
in Armenia. In this book he characterized the art of chalcedonian Armenians as a separate iconographic tradition, which combined Byzantine, Georgian and Armenian elements.
Drawing upon the seminal works of A. Grabar
, H.Belting
, H. Maguire and Chr. Walter, Lidov developed a method of interpretational iconography, which he put into practice in his study of liturgical
themes in the Byzantine art
and of the symbolism of Heavenly Jerusalem. Lidov has shown that new theological ideas, formulated in the wake of the Great Schism of 1054, engendered a new kind of Byzantine church iconography with the dominant themes of Christ the Priest
and the Communion of the Apostles. After his trip to the St Catherine Sinai Monastery
in 1996, Lidov published a book-album with the description of its unique collection of icons.
Later Lidov turned to the study of miracle-working icon
s and Christian relics, which was quite a new subject in art history. In 2000 he initiated a program of research and cultural activities “Christian relics”, which included, in particular, two exhibitions and an international conference. During this period Lidov wrote several papers on the Hodegetria of Constantinople and the Holy Mandylion
. While studying the role of miraculous icons and relics in the formation of sacred spaces in the Eastern Christian tradition, Lidov has formulated a new concept of hierotopy
. The term hierotopy has two meanings. It is the creation of sacred spaces as a special form of human creativity and also a related academic field, which spans art history
, archaeology
, anthropology
, and religious studies
. Hierotopy accounts not only for artistic images and the symbolic world they form, but also for the entire collection of various media that serve to organize a sacred space into a spatial icon. The perception of sacred spaces has been analyzed by Lidov in terms of image-paradigms, which reflect the experience of a sacred space in its wholeness and are distinct from any illustrative pictures.
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
Алексей́ Михай́лович Ли́дов) is a Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n art historian
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
and byzantinist
Byzantine studies
Byzantine studies is an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities that addresses the history, culture, costumes, religion, art, such as literature and music, science, economy, and politics of the Byzantine Empire. The discipline's founder in Germany is considered to be the philologist Hieronymus...
, an author of the concept hierotopy
Hierotopy
Hierotopy is the creation of sacred spaces, which is viewed as a special form of human creativity, and a related academic field, which spans anthropology, art history and religious studies. The term was coined in 2001 by Russian art-historian and byzantinist Alexei Lidov...
.
Life and career
Lidov was born in MoscowMoscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
on March 9, 1959. His father, Mikhail Lidov, was a Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n space scientist; his mother, Diana - a mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
. Upon the graduation from the department of art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
of the Moscow State University
Moscow State University
Lomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...
in 1981, his first appointment was at the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow. He earned a Ph. D. in art history from the Moscow State University in 1989. In 1991 he founded the Research Center for the Eastern Christian Culture, an independent non-governmental organization, and has worked as its director. In 2008—2009 he served as the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Art. Since 2010 he also works at the Institute of World Culture as director of research. Lidov has lectured at Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne universities et al. He initiated several research programs and organized nine international symposia on iconographical
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
and hierotopical
Hierotopy
Hierotopy is the creation of sacred spaces, which is viewed as a special form of human creativity, and a related academic field, which spans anthropology, art history and religious studies. The term was coined in 2001 by Russian art-historian and byzantinist Alexei Lidov...
subjects.
Research
During his studies at the University of Moscow Lidov specialized in the ByzantineByzantium
Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC and named after their king Byzas . The name Byzantium is a Latinization of the original name Byzantion...
art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
. While working as a researcher at the State Museum of Oriental Art, he studied the Christian art of Armenia
Armenia
Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...
and Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
. Building upon the material of his Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
thesis, he published in 1991 his first book about the mural paintings of the Akhtala monastery
Akhtala monastery
Akhtala is a 10th-century fortified Armenian Apostolic Church monastery located in the town of Akhtala in the marz of Lori, north of Yerevan. The monastery is currently inactive. The fortress played a major role in protecting the north-western regions of Armenia and is among the most well...
in Armenia. In this book he characterized the art of chalcedonian Armenians as a separate iconographic tradition, which combined Byzantine, Georgian and Armenian elements.
Drawing upon the seminal works of A. Grabar
André Grabar
André Grabar was an art historian of Medieval and Byzantine art. Born and raised in Ukraine and educated in the Russian Empire, he spent much of his career in France and the US but wrote all his papers in French...
, H.Belting
Hans Belting
Hans Belting is a German art historian and theorist of medieval and Renaissance art, as well as contemporary art and image theory.-Background:...
, H. Maguire and Chr. Walter, Lidov developed a method of interpretational iconography, which he put into practice in his study of liturgical
Liturgy
Liturgy is either the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to its particular traditions or a more precise term that distinguishes between those religious groups who believe their ritual requires the "people" to do the "work" of responding to the priest, and those...
themes in the Byzantine art
Byzantine art
Byzantine art is the term commonly used to describe the artistic products of the Byzantine Empire from about the 5th century until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453....
and of the symbolism of Heavenly Jerusalem. Lidov has shown that new theological ideas, formulated in the wake of the Great Schism of 1054, engendered a new kind of Byzantine church iconography with the dominant themes of Christ the Priest
Christ Pantocrator
In Christian iconography, Christ Pantokrator refers to a specific depiction of Christ. Pantocrator or Pantokrator is a translation of one of many Names of God in Judaism...
and the Communion of the Apostles. After his trip to the St Catherine Sinai Monastery
Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai
Saint Catherine's Monastery lies on the Sinai Peninsula, at the mouth of a gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai in the city of Saint Catherine in Egypt's South Sinai Governorate. The monastery is Orthodox and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site...
in 1996, Lidov published a book-album with the description of its unique collection of icons.
Later Lidov turned to the study of miracle-working icon
Icon
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...
s and Christian relics, which was quite a new subject in art history. In 2000 he initiated a program of research and cultural activities “Christian relics”, which included, in particular, two exhibitions and an international conference. During this period Lidov wrote several papers on the Hodegetria of Constantinople and the Holy Mandylion
Image of Edessa
According to Christian legend, the Image of Edessa was a holy relic consisting of a square or rectangle of cloth upon which a miraculous image of the face of Jesus was imprinted — the first icon ....
. While studying the role of miraculous icons and relics in the formation of sacred spaces in the Eastern Christian tradition, Lidov has formulated a new concept of hierotopy
Hierotopy
Hierotopy is the creation of sacred spaces, which is viewed as a special form of human creativity, and a related academic field, which spans anthropology, art history and religious studies. The term was coined in 2001 by Russian art-historian and byzantinist Alexei Lidov...
. The term hierotopy has two meanings. It is the creation of sacred spaces as a special form of human creativity and also a related academic field, which spans art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
, archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
, anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, and religious studies
Religious studies
Religious studies is the academic field of multi-disciplinary, secular study of religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing systematic, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.While theology attempts to...
. Hierotopy accounts not only for artistic images and the symbolic world they form, but also for the entire collection of various media that serve to organize a sacred space into a spatial icon. The perception of sacred spaces has been analyzed by Lidov in terms of image-paradigms, which reflect the experience of a sacred space in its wholeness and are distinct from any illustrative pictures.
Awards and honors
- Russian Academy of Art — corresponding member since 2007
- Gold medal of the Russian Academy of Art for the book.
Books (author)
- The Mural Paintings of Akhtala. Moscow, 1991
- Byzantine icons of Sinai. Moscow-Athens, 1999
- Holy Mandylion in Russian iconography. Moscow, 2005 (with L. Evseeva and N. Chugreeva)
- Hierotopy. Spatial icons and image-paradigms in Byzantine culture. Moscow, 2010
Books (editor)
- Jerusalem in the Russian culture. Moscow, 1994
- Eastern Christian Churches. Liturgy and art. Moscow, 1994
- Miracle-working icons in Byzantium and old Russia, 1996
- The Miraculos image. Icons of Our Lady in the Tretyakov gallery. Moscow, 1999
- Christian relics in the Moscow Kremlin. Moscow, 2000
- Iconostasis: origins, evolution, symbolism. Moscow, 2000
- Eastern Christian relics. Moscow, 2003
- Relics in Byzantium and Medieval Russia. Written sources. Moscow, 2006
- Hierotopy. Creation of sacred spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia. Moscow, 2006
- Hierotopy. Comparative studies of sacred spaces. Moscow, 2009
- New Jerusalems. Hierotopy and iconography of sacred spaces. Moscow, 2009
- Spatial icons. Textuality and performativity. Moscow, 2009
Selected publications
- L’Image du Christ-prelat dans le programme iconographique de Sainte Sophia d’Ohride. In: Arte Cristiana, fasc. 745. Milano, 1991, p. 245-250
- L’art des Armeniens Chalcedoniens Atti del Quinto Simposio Internazionale di Arte Armena 1988, Venezia 1992, pp. 479–495
- Christ the Priest in Byzantine Church Decoration of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Selected papers of the 18th International Congress of Byzantine Studies. Moscow, 1991. Vol.III: Art History, Architecture, Music. Shepherdstown, WV, 1996, pp. 158–170
- Byzantine Church Decoration and the Schism of 1054. Byzantion, LXVIII/2 (1998), pp. 381–405.
- Heavenly Jerusalem: the Byzantine Approach. In: «The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Art of Judaism, Christianity and Islam». Jerusalem, 1998, pp. 341–353
- Byzantine Church Decoration and the Schism of 1054. Byzantion, LXVIII/2 (1998), pp. 381–405
- Miracle-Working Icons of the Mother of God. In: «Mother of God. Representation of the Virgin in Byzantine Art». Athens, ‘Skira’, 2000, pp. 47–57
- The Miracle of Reproduction. The Mandylion and Keramion as a paradigm of sacred space. In: «L’Immagine di Cristo dall. Acheropiita dalla mano d’artista» Editors C. Frommel and G. Wolf. Citta del Vaticano. Rome, 2006
- The Flying Hodegetria. The Miraculous Icon as Bearer of Sacred Space. In: «The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance». Editors E. Thuno, G. Wolf. Rome, 2004
- Leo the Wise and the Miraculous Icons in Hagia Sophia. In: «The Heroes of the Orthodox Church. The New Saints, 8th to 16th century». Editor E. Kountura-Galaki. Athens, 2004
- The Canopy over the Holy Sepulchre: On the Origins of Onion-Shaped Domes. In: «Jerusalem in Russian Culture». New York, 2005
- «Il Dio russo». Culto e iconografia di San Nikola nell’antica Russia. In: «San Nicola. Splendori d’arte d’Oriente e d’Occidente». Editor M. Bacci. Milano, 2006
- The Mandylion over the Gate. A mental pilgrimage to the holy city of Edessa. In: "Routes of Faith in the Medieval Mediterranean. Thessaloniki, 2008, pp.179-192.
- 'Image-Paradigms' as a Notion of Mediterranean Visual Culture: a Hierotopic Approach to Art History. In: «Crossing Cultures. Papers of the International Congress of Art History». CIHA 2008. Melbourne, 2009, pp. 177–183
External links
- Lidov on the site of the Russian Academy of Art (in Russian)
- Lidov on the site of the Institute of World Culture (in Russian)
- The Weitzmann lecture announcement in 2008 at Prinston
- Preservation of the Orthodox cultural heritage in Kosovo, report to the UNESCO
- Lidov's interview to a Russian newspaper related to the problem of the restitution of the church property (in Russian)
- Lidov's lectures at the Universtiy of Budapesht