The church as a space of images in picturesque proskinetariums. A visual program for the pilgrim

Abstract

The author researches the theme of the facial pictorial proskinitariums – jerusalemija. They were the manifestations of hierotopia, reflecting the sacred topography of the Holy Land within the iconic space. At the same time the jerusalemija visualized the pilgrim’s journey in the Holy Land in the 18^th – early 20^th centuries through images available to the pilgrim. The name of the place was visualized by creating an associative pictorial symbol, while the visual image was often supported by text referring to the lines of the New or Old Testament. The iconography of ‘jerusalemija’ dates back to the engravings of Western European masters of the 16^th – 17^th centuries and to the engravings of illustrators of printed proskinitariums (“walks”), for example, Christopher Zhefarovich. Traditionally Palestine and in particular Jerusalem was the center for the production of “jerusalemija”, also known as the pilgrim’s icon-eulogy “Topography of the Holy Land”. When studying the published monuments from foreign and Russian collections, the author identified the main iconographic types of “jerusalemija”, originating from different protographs: 1) “jerusalemija” as a map-icon, where the topography is primary, and the prayer image is secondary; such a type existed in a small and expanded versions; 2) “jerusalemija’ is a prayer image (souvenir icon for pilgrims) that consisted of two subgroups that differed in the degree of significance of the prayer component and the presence of topography. That group of sources includes a rare image from a private Russian collection, which was not painted in the workshops of Palestine, but executed as a copy of the eulogy icon by an iconographer of one of the Chernigov monasteries in the middle of the 18^th century. The author analyzes its program and iconographic features. The paper is also focused on the iconographic schemes of various groups of “jerusalemijas”, and reveals their characteristic features and specifics as a hierotopic project.