Some historical works, which were considered very ancient in antiquity, were forged in some later time, as it was ascertained. One of the best-known examples is the treatise The foundation of Miletus and the whole Ionia, which was ascribed to Cadmus of Miletus but really written in the Late Classical period, and even not in Miletus. Cephalon of Gergithes was cited as a “very ancient” historian; as a matter of fact, he was invented by Hegesianax, a writer of the 3rd–2nd centuries B.C.). Such a counterfeit as Amelesagoras’ Atthis deceived even Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a subtle expert, who unhesitatingly included its author into his list of the earliest historians, although that Atthis is a product of the Late Classical time. The articles cites and analyzes some extant fragments of these counterfeits (they deal mostly with various mythological subjects), and also raises the question: for what purpose such “armchair” and book-learning studies, which were popular from the Late Classical period and became especially widespread during the Hellenistic one, were provided with fictitious authors who allegedly lived much earlier? One may suppose that the aim was securing an “authority of the old times”.

The article deals with the analysis of political pamphlets, which numerously appeared in France in 1589. Their authors criticized the actions of King Henry III, on whose direct orders the leaders of the Catholic League, Henry I, Duke of Guise, and his brother Louis, Archbishop of Reims and Cardinal of Lorraine, were killed. The monarch was accused of a wide variety of crimes, including practicing witchcraft, which, according to the king’s opponents, was directly related to the spread of Protestantism in France. In most cases, witchcraft was described in pamphlets within the framework of yet medieval European demonology. However, the author of the article draws attention to the new motives that got a very special development at the end of the 16th century. The pamphlets of 1589 clearly show the gradual transformation of Henry III into a witch, who was characterized exclusively by female witchcraft practices and tricks. According to the author of the article, such gender transformations were connected both with the general direction of the development of European demonology, and with the personal qualities of the monarch himself, rumors about whose intimate life agitated French society throughout his reign.

The article deals with the interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s most enigmatic triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1505), with particular emphasis on its left panel. It depicts Eden and the moment when the first man gazes upon the first woman. The author shows how the iconography of the scene differs from the conventions of the time, and how the Dutch artist introduces the theme of evil permeating nature and humanity without depicting either the Fall of the angels or the Temptation of Adam and Eve. Special attention is given to the yellow anthropomorphic rock, which probably symbolizes the diabolic presence in the earthly paradise. To elucidate such ambiguous motif, the study engages with the tradition of anthropomorphic landscapes that flourished in the sixteenth century and draws upon Michel Weemans’s recent theoretical framework. The article concludes by tracing visual correspondences between paradise and hell – such as the Fountain of Life and the Tree-Man, or the rock-face and the lantern with the knife etc. The author shows how a master from Hertogenbosch transforms the familiar narratives and iconographic motifs of his time, playing with the viewer’s recognition or non-recognition.

The article considers the little-studied aspects of the medieval cult of the icon of Our Lady from the Syrian monastery of Saydnaya (near Damascus). The specifics of that shrine lies in the multi-confessional nature of its veneration. Such examples were not uncommon in the Holy Land, where Christians and Muslims may have shared a sacred history and topography. Researchers, primarily based on the analysis of Western sources, until recently emphasized the fact that the worship of Our Lady of Saydnaya brought together representatives of different confessions who shared common views on the cult. However, a closer look at Eastern Christian and Muslim sources reveals that each religious group venerated the icon based on its own religious concepts, primarily regarding the doctrine of the Incarnation. While Western Christians believed in the “incarnation” of the Mother of God and viewed the “incarnate oil” and flesh as divine substances, Eastern Christians did not emphasize that aspect of the cult. Muslims rejected the material nature of the worship of icona incarnata and the crude interpretation of the idea of incarnation. At the same time, Western prelates used the experience of multifaith veneration of the sacred image for their own purposes, attempting to persuade Muslims to convert to Christianity, which led to the creation of a legend in medieval Western Christianity about a Saracen who was converted to Christianity under the influence of contemplating the image of Our Lady.

The article describes the role of the beard as an iconographic sign of the Old Russian art. Making a brief overview of medieval Russian ideas about the beard, the author proceeds to analyze iconography and demonstrates that in different visual contexts, the beard had a range of unobvious meanings. The hair on the character’s face marked not only his gender (male) and age (young man, mature man, old man). In a certain context, the presence or absence of a beard indicated a child-parent relationship (King Solomon most often does not have a beard, as he is depicted next to his father King David). Certain types of beard indicated a hermit. When it appeared on face of the soul of the deceased, the beard helped to concretize the depicted, de-anonymize the figure. The beard on the angel’s face maked him an ambiguous character (like the punishing angels on the Euphrates River from the Revelation of John the Theologian). With demons, the beard served as a sign of hierarchical supremacy – it is the way to depict the demonic “princes”, leaders, etc., including Satan. Finally, at the end of the Russian Middle Ages, various “enemies” began to be painted with moustaches and beardless faces. That reflected the negative perception of shaving in general and foreigners shaving their faces. After Peter the Great’s cultural reforms, the same sign in the Old Believer miniature began to indicate “heretics”-Nikonians having their beards shaved.

The article considers the veneration of relics which has been widespread in Old Russia since the first centuries of its Christianization, as a mechanism that facilitates the transformation of hierotopy and the development of the figurative environment of the church interior. The author’s observations and conclusions are based on the study of written sources and artefacts associated with the veneration of the remains of St. Daniel of Pereslavl in the Trinity and St. Daniel Monastery of Pereslavl-Zalessky in the second half of the 17th century. The study shows how the development of the veneration of the abbot-founder of the monastery became the third element that determined, along with the cults of the Trinity and St. John the Baptist, which retained their significance, the sacred and figurative structure of the interior space of the main monastery church, Trinity Cathedral. It is evidenced by the compositions of the fresco ensemble of the main volume of this church building and the new iconostases of the central part and the northern aisle, which was built thanks to the funds received by the monastery from pilgrimages to the relics of St. Daniel. The image of the saint himself occupied a prominent place in the visual environment of the church: it was repeatedly reproduced by various artistic means (in murals, icon painting, book miniatures), highlighted by location and other techniques, which are also analyzed in the article. A special role was given to the tomb complex of the saint, located in the northern aisle of the cathedral, which as can be judged from the inventories of the church property was arranged in a manner typical of that time and, in addition to the relics, included perhaps the oldest monastery icon of St. Daniel and a set of tomb covers.

Icons with numerous scenes (klejma) arranged in two or more rows around the centerpiece demonstrate a variation from the norm of classical principles of the vita icon composition. The article offers some reflections on the specifics of their development in the 16th century Russian art (primarily in a time of Ivan IV) and the compositional features of their pictorial cycle in relation to the central image in the middle panel. The author refers to the widely known findings on this subject, supplementing them with his own observations on the pictorial and figurative structure of such icons. Using specific monuments as examples, among which the icon of St. Alexander of Svir with his life story in 129 scenes from the mid-16th century and a partially preserved group of the holiday icons with Gospel scenes” from the 1560s – 1570s from the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, the author discovers that the extensive development of the cycle, leading to the multiplication of scenes, is caused not only by the detailed illustration of the text underlying the image, but also, apparently, by the desire to experience the events of the Gospels or the deeds of Russian saints as fully as possible. The new compositional solution of the pictorial narrative leads to the emergence of new features of the prayer image.

Drawing on the material of contemporary Altai mythology, the article considers the non-verbal semiotics of communication with “non-humans” (spirits, deities). The primary focus is on the phenomenon of attributed emotion – that is, how various emotional states (anger, benevolence, resentment, etc.) are ascribed to spirits, objects, and natural phenomena, and are subsequently recognized and interpreted as an emotional response through non-verbal channels of communication. The author introduces and elaborates the concepts of the “quasibody” and “quasi-gesture,” which are crucial for understanding the processual nature of attributed emotion. The article describes how spirits and other numinous agents express their reactions not through their own (absent or invisible) bodies, but through elements of the surrounding world. Such “quasi-bodies” can include ritual objects (e. g., a shaman’s drum, the Altai musical instrument topshuur, a ritual chalice), natural elements (fire, water, air), as well as animals and even people. Their specific alterations (the deformation of a ritual object, an increase in a water current’s flow, particular patterns in a flame’s burning, agitation in the air, or the appearance of certain animals) are read as “quasi-gestures” carrying an emotional response. It is emphasized that such practices of recognizing attributed and distributed emotions are based on the mythologization of everyday objects, whereby virtually any thing or phenomenon can become a situational embodiment (a “quasi-body”) of a numinous agent and a vehicle for its emotional message.

Soviet icons – handmade devotional images decorated with foil – were the most widespread religious artifacts of the USSR era. Those objects are now falling out of use and ceasing to participate in religious practices. Nevertheless, they have attracted considerable interest from scholars who are engaged not only in their study and exhibition but also in their collection, preservation, and restoration. The article focuses on restoration methodology as a necessary stage in the comprehensive study of Soviet icons. Viewing the bricolage artifacts as “containers of memory” that hold information about the material culture and everyday life of their time, the author describes a step-by-step strategy for studying the artifacts during their conservation. Minimal intervention, ensuring the object’s preservation, and the maximal revelation of its original characteristics and hidden “information layers” are proposed as the primary goal of such restoration. The creation of a photo dossier documenting all stages of the work is presented as a crucial component of the methodology. Such an approach allows not only for the preservation of unique items of Soviet religious life but also for the extraction of the historical and cultural information they contain, enabling the reconstruction of an artifact’s “biography”, the identification of traces of later modifications, and the establishment of local traditions of Soviet “foil icons”.

The authors describe foil icons, which were created in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th – early 20th century. It was the period when large and small craft centers for creating kiot icon appeared in Russia and began to develop dynamically. The craftsmen worked in monasteries, towns and villages. Cheaper artifacts were widely sold, while expensive and high–quality ones were made for wealthier buyers, most often from the merchant class and urban commoners. The largest production center was the Vyaznikovsky district of the Vladimir province (the villages of Palekh, Mstera and Kholui). The second famous center was Borisov Settlement (Borisovskaya Sloboda) – foil icons were created in Bogoroditse-Tikhvin monastery and in Borisovka settlement of the Belgorod region. Borisov icons were distinguished by their high quality, specific paintings, and intricate work with foil, paper, velvet, and other materials. However, there were other large craft-centers in the Russia, centers that have not yet attracted the attention of researchers. As the authors show, most interesting in artistic and craft terms were the icons created in the Tver and Vologda provinces. Local craftsmen set their own distinctive styles, which were closely linked to the traditions of Russian art and icon painting of the 16th–18th centuries. The icons of the Tver and Vologda masters were kindred in terms of materials, as well as artistic and technological solutions. The study of those undescribed traditions is an important task.

Bertolt Brecht is widely regarded as a theorist of epic theatre, primarily associated with the concept of alienation (Verfremdungseffekte). As demonstrated in the article, the concept of alienation in Brecht’s theoretical framework is subject to the basic requirement of historicity: to present actions and characters as related to a historically inherited or lived environment. Our analysis of Brecht’s fundamental position of historicization within the theatrical action reveals the potential of the actor’s phenomenal body to reveal these tasks. In this regard, the present study draws upon the concept of the phenomenal and semiotic body of the actor (Erika Fischer-Lichte) to demonstrate how the aesthetic differences in contemporary interpretations of Brecht can be attributed to divergent approaches to representing the historicity of the social environment, namely through the semiotic or the phenomenal body. In the case of performative readings of Brecht F.R. Ankersmith’s notion of Sublime Experience greatly helps to understand new categorisations of history on stage. For Ankersmit, the genuine experience of history is the experience of a traumatically lived radical rupture between the past and the present is a salient one. The final part of the text deals with the manner in which Butusov’s Drums in the Night creates an experience of the Eerie (which is a marker of authentic historical experience according to Ankersmit).

The article analyzes the modes of perceiving and representing female embodiment in the cinematography of A. Balabanov, focusing on the heroines Anzhelika and Yekaterina Kirillovna in “Pro urodov i lyudey” (“On Monsters and Humans”), Tata in “Mne ne bolno” (“It Doesn’t Hurt Me”), and Anzhelika and Antonina in “Gruz 200” (“Cargo 200”). Based on haptic and optical ways of perceiving the body on the cinema screen, the article analyses the features of the depiction of the female body in film, considering the female body in the positions of subject, object and abject, which alternate with each other. Attention is paid to the process through which each heroine maneuvers between an objectified state and a subjective position, the transitions between these categories are analyzed, and it is determined how changes in corporeality reflect the heroines’ paths. The author focuses on the relationship between the representation of the female body in cinema and the depiction of the motifs of violence, power, and illness through the category of the abject as something rejected from the norm. The analysis explores how women, predominantly represented in the film as abject figures, differ from those who, in the course of the narrative, maneuver between objectified and subjective positions. Through addressing abject-heroines, the paper explores the functioning of haptic perception, which is activated in the spectator during the process of viewing. The author concludes that subjectivity predominates over objectification of the female body in A. Balabanov’s films and that abject-heroines have the potential to overcome their own abjection.

The article deals with the theory of “continual light” developed by the Russian light artist Sergei Mikhailovich Zorin (1944–2023), a member of the Dvizheniye Group, founder of the Optical Theatre, and inventor of a range of light-kinetic instruments. Drawing on his autobiography, the study considers how in the context of late Soviet and post-Soviet culture Zorin linked the technological nature of light to the possibility of generating a distinctive bodily, intellectual, and spiritual experience in the viewer. He consistently opposed continual light-understood as uninterrupted and close to natural illumination–to the discrete light of film and video imagery, which he regarded as a source of perceptual fragmentation and as detrimental to human psychological and spiritual well-being. The article further analyzes the influence of Alexander Scriabin’s mysterial ideas and the broader conceptual developments surrounding continuity that shaped Zorin’s artistic concept. It argues that Zorin’s work can be interpreted through optics of Birgit Meyer’s works of “sensational forms”, insofar as the creation of a ritual viewing environment, the use of a continuous light flow, and the insistence on live performance enabled experiences of the sacred within a secular artistic setting.