Херувим из иллюстративного ряда Speculum theologiae

Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета. Серия 5: Вопросы истории и теории христианского искусства. 2019. № 35. С. 33–47.

Egorova A.

The Mirror of Theology (Speculum theologiae) is a unique example of a book miniature of the Latin Middle Ages. It represents an embodiment of the Catholic didactics of the 13th 15th centuries concentrated to its maximum. This article studies one of the miniatures of the illustrative range of the Speculum theologiae with a schematic drawing of a cherub. It is not only an image but also a chart into which the main theses of Alan’s of Lille treatise On the Six-Winged Cherub are incorporated. The article uses a number of artefacts as examples and scrutinises the formation and development of the iconography. A detailed analysis of each miniature allows one to understand the way how the coёxistence and mutual infl uence of the word and the image are expressed in the these specific cases. The article also demonstrates the correlation of the iconographic scheme with other didactic visual diagrams contained in the collection of the Speculum theologiae. A sheet with a schematic image of the cherub is studied in the article not as a lone-standing illustration accompanying the theological dissertation but as an element in the whole array of miniatures. In order to carry out the study, the author of the article has read and translated into Russian the charts-illustrations with the images of cherubs. A comprehensive translation allowed the author to understand the princliple of work of the illustration, i.e. how it combines images and texts, how they occupy their sometimes interchangeable, sometimes irreducible positions, how such exquisitely refined iconography is created in the golden age of the schematic theology of scholasticism.

Keywords: средневековые рукописи, medieval theology, средневековая миниатюра, Искусство западноевропейского Средневековья, средневековая иконография, Iconography of ancient and medieval art, medieval illuminated manuscripts, Visual diagrams, Medieval craft of memory, визуальные диаграммы, искусство памяти в средние века, средневековое богословие, иллюминированные рукописи