Oleg Tarasov is one of the few authors who has an equally profound knowledge of Russian sources and Western material and scholarship. His new book brings back to life the early twentieth-century discovery of Russian medieval art and of the Italian primitives and the influence this rediscovery had on European culture in the pre-War period.
Clemena Antonova
Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, author of 'Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy' (2020)
Oleg Tarasov has established himself in the course of this century as the most important art critic and historian writing on the nature of the icon, especially the Russian icon. Those who know his earlier works on he Russian icon, the development of traditions of icon painting, and the discovery of the icon as a distinct category of religious art in its own right will find much that is familiar in these essays, gathered together in this volume, and expertly translated by Stella Rock.
Andrew Louth
Sobornost (Eastern Churches Review), vol. 46, no. 1, 2024.
Oleg Tarasov is an independent scholar (Rome). The author of numerous publications on cultural history and art, his books include Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, transl. and ed. by R.-M. Gulland (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich, transl. by R.-M. Gulland and A. Wood (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), and Russian Art Nouveau and Ancient Icons (Moscow: Indrik, 2016) (in Russian). Oleg obtained a Ph.D. in History at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in Art History at Department of History and Theory of Arts of the State Moscow University. He held posts at the State Moscow University, Department of History, and at the Department of Cultural History of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Oleg has been awarded fellowships at the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini di Venezia, Italy, at the Getty Research Institute, USA and at Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria.
Stella Rock is Honorary Associate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Social Sciences and Global Studies, Religious Studies at the Open university (UK). Her publications include Popular Religion in Russia: ‘Double-belief’ and the making of an Academic Myth (Abington & New York: Routledge, 2007); “Russian Piety and Orthodox Culture 1380–1589”, in Angold, M. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 253–75; ‘The life of dry bones: Pilgrimage to relic shrines in Soviet Russia’, in Pazos, Antón M. (ed.), Relics, Shrines and Pilgrimages: Sanctity in Europe from Late Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).