Armenian Art: An Overview

L’arte armena, Storia critica e nuove prospettive, Studies in Armenian and Eastern Christian Art 2020, EURASIATICA,16, Serie diretta da A. Ferrari, S. Riccioni, M. Rufilli, B. Spampinato, Venezia, 2020, p. 51-61., 2020

During the last centuries numerous books and papers were published on Armenian art in different collections of the world. Still there is an ocean of work to do in this field for filling gaps of the history of Armenian art. This paper is devoted to joint work of the members of the Chair of Armenian Art History and Theory at Yerevan State University who were the first who carried out systematic work in Romania in 2011-2017 and Iran in 2015-2019 exploring the Armenian miniatures, icons, wall paintings, silverwork, textiles and etc. The results of this work were presented as papers during the conferences and published as articles.

The article was one of the keynote addresses at the 13th General Conference of the Association international des études arméniennes (AIEA) held in cooperation with the Matenadaran, the Repository of Ancient Manuscripts, which was responsible for the splendid organization, in Erevan last fall. The exercise was to imagine how an entire volume devoted to the arts of Armenia, one of a projected seven-volume series for the Armenian component of Brill’s Handbook of Oriental Studies, the first volume of which, Armenian Philology, was published last year. Among the topics discussed are: How to define Armenian art. How to treat major and minor arts. Should modern and contemporary be included, if so how? How to integrate Armenian art created in the diaspora. Finally, who is the volume to be directed to? And how to accommodate specialists and at the same time those with little or no knowledge of Armenian art.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2020

An illustrated brochure describing the history and content of the IAA, especially the section devoted to Armenian manuscript illumination. the presentation is on the Index before it was digitized. It is informational.

Hortus Artium Medievalium, 26, 2020

The Index of Armenian Art is still a work in progress. The first fascicle or issue covered a specific period with limited and identifiable illustrated Armenian codices. It was to serve as a model for progression century by century in order to present a comprehensive view of Armenian manuscript art. The information is as complete as possible with the resources available forty years ago. The bibliography and iconography need updating, but the information preserved is still useful in understanding the beginnings of Armenian manuscript art. Links to the online version are available on this academia.edu site: https://www.academia.edu/9626300/Index_of_Armenian_Art_IAA_Miniature_Painting.

The checklist provides in tabular form the major illustrated Armenian manuscripts of the eleventh century, a continuation of the Index of Armenian Fascicle I, which cover all Armenian illustrated manuscripts up to the year 1000.

Venezia Arti 27 (2018): pp. 81-102, 2018

This essay deals with the emergence of scholarship on medieval Armenian artefacts with a particular emphasis on the study of manuscripts and miniature painting, and covers the period from the mid-nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century. While the title of this article may appear to stress the heritage of the Armenians as belonging to a ‘national culture’, it also alludes to some early approaches, according to which the origins of non-Armenian arts were also sought in medieval Armenia. Amidst the growing waves of contemporary imperialist and nationalist sentiments in the nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, the interest in Armenian miniature painting commenced almost simultaneously in four different intellectual milieus – Russian, German-speaking, French, and Armenian – each approaching the subject from its own perspective and motivated by issues specific to the given cultural-political realm.

Four short encyclopedia articles on Armenian minor arts for the Macmillan-Grove Dictionary of Art: Ceramics, Jewelry, Metalwork, Textiles.