Dear Friends!

Take a trip to our virtual museum during your coffee or tea break and make your #quarantinediscoveries!

Admire unique cultural assets of the Museum Fund of Ukraine!

Researchers - historians, fine art experts, etc. are called to study previously unknown artifacts and promote them to preserve cultural heritage. This tradition is constantly confirmed by new discoveries. The Preserve collection contains one of the largest collections of negatives in Ukraine (about 10,000 photoplates on glass and film). These things are remarkable witnesses of their time, which allow recreating the reality of that time and exploring the unique monuments of Ukrainian art. Thus, an iconostasis of the 17th – 18th centuries of the Dormition Cathedral of the Svensky Monastery, destroyed in the early 1930s, is engraved on a number of photoplates (13.0x18.0 cm).

This photo fixation was made in the summer of 1930 in an expedition to Bryansk, organized by Ukrainian scientists with the participation of the Lavra Preserve. In particular, the Ukrainian artist, ethnographer and fine art expert Borys Pylypenko (1892–1937) in his letters to the director of the Preserve Petro Kurinny stressed the need to make a photo fixation to save the monument from final destruction.

Negatives presented to your attention feature fragments of a seven-tiered iconostasis of the Dormition Cathedral of the Svensky Monastery, made by Ukrainian or Belarusian masters at the end of the 17th century. The structure had a symmetrical composition with a stepwise increase to the center, triangular arches, typical for Ukrainian iconostasis, a large number of columns decorated with openwork carvings in the form of vines, and ornamented cornices.

Let’s #stayathome and discover the beauties of the Preserve’s collection together!

#museumfromhome, #museumcoffeebreak, #museumteabreak