AVAILABLE MARCH 2012
128 pages, paperback, 300 x 240 mm, 100 colour illustrations
PRICE: £25.00
ISBN: 978-0-9553393-3-2
Customers in the US or Canada, CLICK HERE
Illuminator, painter, scribe, clerk, teacher, doctor of theology, restorer and binder, Mesrop was one of the greatest Armenian artists of his and following generations. He was prolific, working for at least forty-two years in Sos (New Julfa) from 1608 to 1651. This book will be the first serious study of the forty-six of his manuscripts that have survived. The focus of the book, however, is The Four Gospels, one of the few manuscripts painted entirely by Mesrop’s hand and one of the most extensively illuminated in his oeuvre. It includes an extraordinary series of illuminations of both Old and New Testament scenes, with no less than twenty-three full page miniatures, and seventeen smaller miniatures.
The author will shed light not only on Mesrop’s career but on those of Armenian miniaturists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through a thorough analysis of Mesrop’s works Arakelyan is able to closely study the working methods of artists working in the scriptoria of Vaspurakan, Mokk and New Julfa. He will demonstrate the dramatic and exciting way in which these artists developed stylistic and iconographic approaches to painting beyond those of their predecessors. The monograph will have tremendous significance for Armenologists and Byzantinologists in the fields of iconography, Armenian miniature art and theology.
This exhibition and catalogue celebrates the most gifted, inventive and eccentric amateurs of the 18th and early 19th centuries with a selection of drawings, engravings and portraits gathered from Soane's collection and other museums, archives and private houses around the country. More