Engraving from 1666 with the image of the family tree of the Russian Tsar and European art of the 16th – 17th centuries. Visual parallels

Abstract

The article is the first to consider an issue of European parallels of the iconographic scheme used to depict the family tree of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in an engraving from the book by Archbishop Lazar Baranovich “The Spiritual Sword” of 1666. Visual genealogy, which was formed in the culture of the European West in the 11^th – 13^th centuries, became widespread in Russia only under the second sovereign of the Romanov dynasty. Until the beginning of the 18^th century, it was spiritual in nature and was aimed at representing the ruling family as chosen by God. The studied image of the royal tree includes only Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich with his wife and their children. The root of the tree is the Kiev Prince Vladimir, the baptizer of Rus’. It is almost impossible to accurately establish a sample for that iconography, since the collection of engravings of the Kiev-Pechersk Printing House where the book was published and its illustrations were made has not been completely preserved. Identifying the iconographically similar images was facilitated by the study in the Western European art material of the early Modern period. All of them go back to one of the versions of the “Tree of Jesse” growing from the body of the legendary ancestor. The closest analogy to the studied royal tree is the engraving of the Belarusian master Aleksandr Tarasevich “The Polubinsky Family” of 1675. Its analysis allows us to assume that customers and engravers in Eastern European lands in the 17^th century had access to some Western European book and easel engravings that served as common iconographic models for them.