Наукові праці Національної бібліотеки України імені В.І. Вернадського (Jan 2023)
The Features of Baroque Style in Graphics of Ukrainian Church Books from th 17th - 18th cc.
Abstract
The purpose of the article is to discuss the peculiarities of the influence of baroque style on the graphics of Ukrainian church books. The methodological basis of the article was structural semiotics and a comparative analysis of the art decoration of Ukrainian church books in its correlation with the content of the text part of the book. The scientific novelty lies in the expansion of previously held beliefs regarding the functions of the decorative elements of Ukrainian church book. It has been established that the influence of baroque aesthetics was an influential factor in the development of the primary principles of illustration used in a variety of functional and thematic types of church books. Conclusions. The revision of Ukrainian church books from the 17th to 18th centuries as a comprehensive art system that functions within the book culture system of the Baroque era enables us to identify common baroque aids to metaphorical visualization of the book image. By comparing the engraved title pages, frontispieces, and illustrations of the Lviv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pochaiv republishings of the same church book, we can observe the appearance and evolution of metaphors associated with the particular thematic and functional type of a church book. Employing book graphics to emphasize the image of the author and to generalize the image of the book’s content, are the most common methods for implementing this artistic device. The metaphorical visualization of an editor and addressee of the edition, realized in a particular emblematic image, is an artistic device, common for the majority of Ukrainian early printed editions of the Baroque epoque. All artistic techniques used to transform the traditional elements of art decoration of church editions into visual metaphors of a book are frequently used in Ukrainian old printed editions’ forewords and dedications to create verbal metaphors of a book.
