Scholarly record

COPYING AS A METHOD OF RESEARCH AND PRESERVATION OF MONUMENTS OF ANCIENT RUSSIAN ART

Tatiana Laska, S. Golubkov

Abstract

In today's world the conservation, restoration and study of works of art, of course, is recognised as one of the priority tasks facing the world community. For Russia this problem is particularly acute as dozens of architectural ensembles, monuments, and churches were destroyed during the Second World War. Despite the tremendous work on reconstruction of different artefacts, many masterpieces of ancient Russian art have not yet been restored to an acceptable display condition. In recent decades, work on the reconstruction and restoration of the ruined artefacts of ancient Russian art that until recently were considered irretrievably lost is becoming more intense. Many churches, including those whose interiors were painted, have been restored in their architectural volumes. This results in the question which naturally arises about the revival of their murals as an integral part of the architectural and artistic ensemble. However, many objects cannot be restored in full, and restored (or subject to restoration) parts of the ensemble because of their fragmentary nature cannot give a complete picture of such an artefact. Some ensembles are so lost that even experts are not able to present the complete picture judging by preserved and restored areas. The creation and demonstration of documentary copies which, using archival materials, compensate for loss or damage occurred in the recent past, gives the opportunity to move to a qualitatively new level of preserving and transmitting cultural heritage. One would think that copying of an artefact can be successfully performed nowadays by detailed digital camera work. However, at the same time, what remains unclear is a whole series of the most important components of the work of art - from its original colour, the comprehension of certain artistic techniques, the sequence of the process of creating the author's work to the identification of its general artistic and ideological design, which, of course, makes it possible to implement science-based copying.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocialF2018/6.3/S10.002

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