(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 1

14:00-15:00 Stefania Demchuk Byzantium or West: Periodization of Ukrainian Medieval Art History and the Challenge of Commensurability

The history of medieval Ukraine can be easily described as controversial. There is no precise data and, thus, no agreement about the origin of the civilization that was labeled as ‘Kievan Rus’, i.e., the strife between the so-called ‘Normanists’ and ‘Anti-Normanists’. Moreover, there is no agreement about the label either, making scholars drift between Rus’, Kievan Rus’, Rus’-Ukraine or even Kievan Russia. The periodization of Ukrainian medieval art and its (in)commensurability with European art is another challenge historiography had and still has to tackle. Anti-Normanists insist that Ukrainian medieval art does not fit into the framework of the major European styles like Romanesque or Gothic. Normanists, in their turn, argue for the Rus’ as a culturally polymorphic community tied into the web of artistic mobility and exchanges between Byzantium and Western European countries. To support the claim, that the periodization of Ukrainian medieval art is commeasurable with the European framework, three cases shall be examined where the entanglement of various artistic traditions of the territory of Ukraine is particularly evident.

15:00-16:00 Nazar Kozak The Clash of Images: Religious Art and Social Flux in Early Modern Ukraine

In the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, the lands of present-day Ukraine gained a special significance as a site of transcultural change. Local (post)Byzantine art underwent extensive remodeling with a mix of Late Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque developments transmitted from the Catholic and Protestant West. This change took place against the complex political turmoil resulting in shifting identities and borders. By focusing on the complex intersection between artistic change and social flux, this lecture aims to elucidate how religious imagery participated in the dynamic interplay among conflicted ideologies operating in early modern Ukraine.

Stefania Demchuk, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Currently she is a Research Fellow, Department of Art History, Masaryk University, Brno. She is working on her postdoctoral project devoted to the culture of memory and art of Sixteenth century Netherlands. The talk is a part of a larger study of historiography within the project, which looks at intellectual exchanges ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ European art histories.

Nazar Kozak, PhD, is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Art History, National Academy of Science of Ukraine, Department of Art History. He is also an Associate Professor at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Kozak received a PhD from Lviv Academy of Arts in 2000. Kozak is working in two subfields of art history simultaneously: medieval and contemporary. His research on the medieval period concerns political iconography and art exchanges in Byzantine and post-Byzantine cultural spheres. In contemporary art studies, Kozak is exploring art’s agency in crisis situations.

For participation online via Zoom please follow this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcrdOGqrzsqEtLQiUh_xHZEO7B9dC3Vro2h https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcrdOGqrzsqEtLQiUh_xHZEO7B9dC3Vro2h

Scientific organization: Oleksandra Osadcha