The article begins by refuting the popular topos of “eternal philosophical problems” and then establishes several oppositions, explicit or implicit, in contemporary intellectual history and, more narrowly, in the history of philosophy. Is philosophy merely a succession of philosophers, or some unifed enterprise? For philosophical temporality, the crucial conceptualization was Hegel’s establishment of the unity of the logical and the historical. Hegelian (or other) progressivism is opposed by preformism. In historical-philosophical scholarship, the distinction between the history of philosophy proper and the history of reception, which should ideally complement each other, plays an important role. The study of the success or failure of a certain doctrine can be very relevant. Another important opposition: dialogue, or direct communication with a thinker of the past against the thematisation of distance. Finally, an opposition between two research orientations is introduced: evolutionarycumulative and revolutionary-catastrophic. The author concludes by examining the temporal implication of three recent Russian historical-philosophical studies on Stefan George Circle, Scholasticism and Heidegger respectively.

At various times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, realism became the most important imperative of “modernity”. The real, like a ghost, keeps coming back in different conceptual guises and under different names. Reality/actuality became not only the subject of reflection but also a principle, a criterion, a value, a key argument. Hence the polemical variation of the concept: “most realistic” versus “realistic”, “real” art versus “realism”, “real” versus “reality”, etc. Today in philosophy, political thought, ethics, and aesthetics we again observe a tense reflection on the real. But this reflection often lacks historicism. And working with the real through the optics of intellectual history is highly problematic, exposing the risks of this approach itself. The task of the paper is to raise a number of questions, not obvious in the author’s view, from an integral historical perspective. What are we facing – a concept (semantic feld) or an ideological complex? When we talk about the realisms of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-frst centuries, are we talking about the development of the same paradigm? What is the identity/homology of the search for reality in different felds of thought and artistic practice? Is there a principle that allows us to construct a typology of historical forms of thinking about reality? What role does research distance play in the reflection of these forms, since often one realism acts as a theory in relation to another? Is it possible to construct a periodization of realist formations of “modernity” by declaring modernity an “age of the real”? What role in the fate of realism is played by the ruptures of historical tradition and the reinterpretation of previous legacies?

The article examines the temporalizing rhetorical devices used in water cure manuals of the 1840s. Following in the footsteps of Johannes Fabian, temporalization is understood as referring to a plethora of ways in which relations of time can be constructed in a text. Often rather than not, these relations place the modern self in opposition to ‘archaic’ Others. The cold water cure, an alternative treatment mode that gained popularity in Europe and the USA in the frst half of the nineteenth century, saw its Other above all in the ofcial medicine of the era. The latter’s therapeutic staples – bleeding the patient and administering medicaments including mercury compounds – were described in water cure brochures as ‘medieval’ or ‘barbaric’ methods. The authors of hydropathic manuals also saw their progressive values as in opposition to those of illiterate peasants, with whom the cold water cure reportedly originated. The article focuses on the contradictory temporality ascribed to water cure, which was relegated to the past through associations with both Classical antiquity (Hippocratic humor medicine) and peasant culture, portrayed as all but ‘prehistoric’, but at the same time it is in water cure that hopes for a better medical future lay, according to the authors of manuals. This paradoxical entangling of the up-to-date and the archaic is discussed as a characteristic feature of western modernity, which tends to produce the ‘old’ as a potential source of the ‘new’. A special emphasis is placed on representations of the ‘father’ of the cold water cure, Vincenz Priessnitz and the way his ideas are interpreted in his followers’ texts.

The article focuses on the structural and semantic characteristics of “janiform” images in Greek art of the 6th – 4th centuries B.C. Composite depictions of two connected heads (which can be either different or identical), facing in the opposite directions are conspicuously “artifcial” constructs. They are created to express a particular relationship between two entities. In this article, I propose four types of connotation in “janiform” imagery: unity of opposites, complementary connection, emphasis through duplication, interaction and spatial relationship both within the object and between the object with its surroundings. These structural observations are applied to the corpus of East Greek miniature vessels of the 6th century B.C. and janiform Attic plastic vases of the late 6th–5th centuries B.C. Analysis of semantics is reinforced by crossreference to other objects from the same visual milieu.

The allegorical painting by Frans Floris (Louvre collection) was given a number of names, including ‘Allegory of the Trinity’. There are some unconventional elements in the composition of the ‘Adoration of the Trinity’, including the wings flanking the cross, and a hen with her chicks underneath it. Several quotations from both the Old and the New Testaments are used to clarify the message of the painting. In this article an attempt is made to review the signifcance of the image of a bird spreading its wings over its nestlings. Old and New Testament traditions, both textual and iconographic, will be reviewed. Recent analysis by Edward W. Wouk will be complemented with several texts and relating to the Holy Mother in the Franciscan tradition. These images and texts come from late medieval miscellanies of “exempla”, and are believed byWouk to be inspired by the poem ‘Gallina’ by Alardus of Amsterdam and for the conception of Floris’ painting of the Trinity.

The article contains an analysis of nine images (prorisi), signed with the name of the painter Prokopy Chirin, from the book of icon patterns (late 17^th century, RNB. OLDP. F88), which was created as a handbook for Russian iconpainters. Three of them comprise a small half-length Deisis; to this group belongs also the fourth drawing (fol. 185), which is a mirror image of the Mother of God (on fol. 198). The following three imprints, forming a group, show a full-length Deisis with the Holy Trinity in Majesty in the centre. The last two, the “Mother of God of Tikhvin” and the “Mother of God with a Child on the throne and the saints” are independent. All four images (two icons of the Deisis and two of the Virgin), to which the prorisi go back, ft into the so-called “Stroganov” artistic tradition and evidently reproduce the icons of Prokopy Chirin. Moreover, the book contains at least three more images related to his work: “Tsarevich Demetrius and Demetrius of Thessaloniki”, “Tsarevich Demetrius and Roman of Uglich” and “Saint Nicetas”. The icons that served as prototypes for these drawings have survived to the present day, and are stored respectively in the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum and the Smolensk State Museum (reserve.).

This paper concerns the paintings of Agostino Marti, who was active in Lucca in the 1510–1530s. His early work was based on local tradition at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, which was strongly influenced by Florentine models, though in the 1520s he began to adopt the visual language of the High Renaissance. The main source of his paintings in this period was the art of Fra Bartolomeo, who was well known in Lucca. But citations from Raphael’s and Michelangelo’s Roman works in his “Marriage of Virgin” (1523) and the evidence of Lucchese archives both suggest that he visited Rome in 1517. The image of St. Andrew from the Parish Church in Capannori provides further argument in favour of this suggestion. However, some spectacular details in Marti’s later paintings are similar to the prominent works of Rosso Fiorentino and Parmigianino, executed in Florence (1523) and Bologna (1527) respectively. So we may suppose that he also travelled much in the 1520s. Generally, his borrowings from High Renaissance and from Mannerist art were ingenuous and not systematic. They were anticipated by the eclectic character of late Quattrocento Lucchese painting, which was evidently more familiar to him. The use of older models, such as altarpieces painted by his teacher Michele Angelo di Pietro Membrini or by Filippino Lippi, who was an iconic fgure for the Lucchese school, seems more natural for Agostino Marti.