L. I. Lifschitz (Lifshits): Nowgoroder Monumentalgemälde des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts.

Iskusstwo, Moskau, 1987, 526 Seiten mit über 400 Bildern. Gebunden Leinen.

The book by L. I. Lifshits is devoted to the monumental painting of Novgorod of the 14-15th centuries. The city was not accidentally called the Russian Florence". Once a powerful city and the centre of a mighty feudal republic, it boasted dozens of churches decorated with frescoes whose authors were mainly local master craftsmen maintaining close contacts with Moscow, Constantinople and the Balkans. The Great Byzantine artist Theophanes the Greek painted the Church of the Saviour na Ilyine in Novgorod in 1378 and there are full grounds to presume that visiting Serbian masters took part in decorating the churches alongside their Novgorodian colleagues. The whole epochs from the history of Russian art can be described and studied solely by art monuments from Novgorod and its environments. No other Russian city except Novgorod has even fragments of the 14th-century frescoes intact. The researchers could not re-create the flourishing of Russian artistic culture in the pre-Rublyov period already be it not for the ensembles in Volotovo, of the Saviour na Ilyine, St. Theodore Stratilates and Kovalyovo, reflecting the general features and tendencies of all Russian medieval painting. Also unique are 15th-century monuments - frescoes in the churches of St. Sergius of Radonezh and St. Simeon the Receiver of God, St. Nicholas from the Gostinopolsky Monastery, which vividly show the tendencies in local art during the last century of Novgorodian republic. During the Great Patriotic War fascists barbarously destroyed many outstanding masterpieces of Novgorodian art including those in Volotovo, Kovalyovo, Skovorodka and Gostinopolye. We can judge of them only by archive materials, copies and the fragments found by restorers in the ruins. The present publication aims to fully re-create the 14-15th century Novgorodian frescoes using photography on location as well as archive documents, and gives detailed description of all accessible ensembles and historical data concerning the ruined monuments. Iskusstvo Publishers offer its publication for specialists in medieval Russian art and the general public." (englische Zusammenfassung hinten im Schutzumschlag, Text des Buches in Russisch).