International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Svetlana Maltseva
St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation; 
[e-mail]
The Artistic Image of a Church and Its Reflection in Mural Painting 
of Medieval Serbia and Old Rus’
Byzantine mural painting often contains the scenes in which the donators are depicted. 
Curiously, though these images were various and popular, there were no particular place on church 
walls designated for it, so far as it was not a part of the set of pre required scenes. The previous 
study (A. Grabar, S. Radojčić, T. Velmans, and others) explained the variety of iconography of these 
images as follows: people depicted on it had different social status, played different roles in the 
construction of a church. The images themselves could have different meaning. For example, it 
could be the part of a donor’s burial site inside a church. 
With time, a few regional variants of a donator portrait were developed in medieval Serbia and 
Old Rus’, the areas which had close ties with Byzantine Empire (V. Đjurić, M. Tatić-Đurić, G. Babić, 
A. Stojaković, B. Todić, Vojvodić, Č. Marinković, A. Preobrazhensky). These two areas had some 
differences in iconography and mural painting style, in particular the style of donator portraits. 
These differences occurred due to local political and cultural traits. Thereby, the donator portraits 
are the important source of historical data on the social status of a donator, the importance of a 
construction, costumes, details of church interior, etc. The distinct feature of the Serbian tradition 
is the portrayal of a donator with the model of a church in his hands. There are dozens of known 
images of that kind. This type of image came to Serbia from Byzantium, where these models are 
always depicted very realistic, detailed, and with great precision. By those images we can judge 
about stages of the construction and the artistic perception of a church in that epoch.
On the opposite, in Old Rus’, despite the connection between Russian and Byzantine traditions, 
the images of a church model in the hands of a donator are rarely seen; especially, the ones that 

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look precise and realistic. One of the earliest surviving examples of this particular kind of donator 
portraits is the composition in the second layer murals of the Monastery of the Savior in Polotsk 
(first half of the 13
th
century).
During the latest research, we confirmed that details of the image of the church model in 
the hands of the hegumenness St. Euphrosyne of Polotsk matches the one of the monument itself. 
Another good example of the detailed image of a church model comes from Novgorod the Great. 
The model of the Volotovo Church of the Dormition shows the specific features of the original 
structure, such as its composition and proportions.

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