Children’s images as an emotional element of modern monuments to Russian saints

Abstract

Monuments to saints became a characteristic feature of the cultural and religious landscape in Russia and some regions of Belarus in the 21^st century became monuments of saints. Their involvement in various social interactions is studied in the latest studies of folklore and urban anthropology. The initiators of monument installation projects and sculptors are trying to find new subjects as well as forms and images that would meet the needs of modern society, in whose worldview religious and secular elements are intricately intertwined. The article considers an issue of using children’s images in monumental sculptural compositions associated with the glorification of saints. Its main goal is to show the features of such iconographic solutions and their repetition and variability. Monuments to saints with images of children are quite diverse thematically, although they are similar in compositional solutions. Group compositions can incorporate different ideas that do not always take into account the iconographic models developed over the centuries, although they use symbolic elements and techniques for representing characters borrowed from icon painting, as well as motifs of ancient and medieval European sculpture. Content analysis of media publications and Internet resources allows to identify the most striking or typical emotional reactions toward monuments to saints with figures of children and draw conclusions about the connection of those reactions with the specifics in the modern man worldview.