by Natalia ZHILINA, Dr. Sc. (Hist.), Chief Research Scientist, RAS Institute of Archeology

Back in the 10th and early 11th centuries Old Russia, the Rus, was having just her first contacts with Christian monumental arts-architecture, mosaics, icons, frescoes... Yet applied arts were still predominant everywhere. Furnishings, ornamented working tools, weapons and all that reflected the in-trends of the time. Quite small, utilitarian and not imposing, this handiwork of oldtime masters keynotes nonetheless a landmark period in the history of homeland arts during incipient Russian national statehood.

Such artefacts are known largely from archeology finds. Art critics would rather view them in general, as an introduction to real art materialized in Orthodox church buildings and their decor, icons and frescoes including. Studying art works of Old Rus, many scholars and artists will stress their likeness to works of Scandinavian, Moravian and Byzantine masters. But external influences are just one side of the matter: one should also see their role within the Slav-Rus culture. To get a comprehensive view of this development

stage of our applied art it is important to center on its inherent characteristics. We shall try to do that.

SLAV ORIGINS

In the 6th to 9th centuries A.D. Eastern Slavs were turning into a stratified society with rich nobles on top who, unlike the common people, owned nicer and costlier things. Even though elitarian art was forcing its way, applied art still held on as closest to the grass roots. Large, heavy metal ornaments--like neck grivnas (bits), temple rings, bracelets--were quite simple and natural, they matched body proportions and those of the head, neck, and arms and hands. Their making was quite primitive, it was confined to forging, casting, simplest inlays and punching--no frills! Creative artistry was not part of the big style yet. True, in the 7th and 8th centuries stamping techniques of ornamentation were making their way--for instance, in embossed semispheric pendants of different size, with the semispheres arranged singly or merging in designs. This means the inception of a definite style.

By the 8th century major changes had taken place in the Slav dress--one no longer wore several pieces of cloth held together by large clasps, the fibulae. Gone were the cast shoulder clasps of wrought metal, and so were the home-grown European and Eurasian applied art styles. Those things made of bronze, brass and silver livened up with raised ornament and inlays of semiprecious stones, though outwardly quite conspicuous, were not all too expensive.

So far only fifteen buried treasures have been recovered throughout the East-European Plain--in the south, midland, north--that is the territory where the ancient Russian state took body and form. Judging by the coins and other artefacts found in the hoards, they date back to a period prior to anno 882, the officially accepted year of Russian statehood.

The best apparel paraphernalia belonged to the Slav upper crust, warlords and rich warriors of their druzhinas, or bodyguards and troops. The treasures, though fairly rich, contained no gold coins and decorations. Some came from the neighboring Ugro-Finnish and nomadic tribes. Most of these things are rather primitive, too--for instance, large cast earrings supplied with pendants--Slav beauties would wear them together with decorations of their own. The first pieces of East Slav jewelry like radial temple earrings made their appearance. Most experts say that in style these things were a remake of Byzantine earrings.

Late in the 9th and all through the 10th century Slav masters learned the art of filigree* by way of transition to a more complex technique of jewelry ornamentation noted for a great variety of styles and geometry--rhombi, triangles, stripes. A set of geometrical styles appeared.

* Delicate ornamental work of intertwined gold or silver wire.--Ed.

JEWELRY ART OF TENTH-CENTURY SLAVS AND SCANDINAVIANS

The state of Rus in the northern and southern part of Eastern Europe had entered the stage by the end of the 9th century. The archeological material of the 10th century, an age of incipient Rus statehood, reflected a more complex pattern of hierarchy within the social elite.

The use of gold was a departure from awkward cast or punched metal ornaments found in 9th-century hidden treasures. True, only three caches were uncovered and itemized. One opened at Kiev in 1913 had cast and twisted gold bracelets. The ruling elite changed its preferences for precious things. Most caches of the 10th century contained ornaments done in tine jewelry techniques like filigree and stamping. That change of vogue can be associated with a new upper social stratum, the druzhina guards and warriors, the bedrock of power exercised by the princes. Elite warriors depended on merchants and craftsmen for quality weapons, outfit and trappings that served as a status symbol, too.

10th-century caches (twelve all told), associated by and large with the service nobility, break down into two groups. Six recovered in the mid Dnieper region contained traditional Slav jewelry: pendants to a crescent necklace, beads, temporal rings and grape-like headgear pendants. The other six caches contained also foreign items of Scandinavian (upper Dnieper and Novgorod the Great region) and occasionally, of Byzantine make. The distinctions of these two groups of treasures are due to the makeup of a prince's druzhina recruited from ethnic Slavs and Varangians alike. True, the Slav warriors might have liked the exotic ornaments of foreign make, too.

The decor of local and foreign jewelry is different in style. Traditional Slav articles are remarkable for geometrical designs. There was a variety of styles like that in the 10th century: three-dimensional designs made up of granules and filigree stretches welded together, with stamped planar designs (linear-geometric and geometrical) jazzed up with filigree lines, rhombuses and triangles.

Scandinavian articles were noted for frills and curlicues in the shape of fancy rosettes, though the earlier plant-and-tree motifs surfaced now and then. Quite expressive is the partition granular style hailing from northern Europe and possibly, from the Byzantine Empire. Fine filigree wire formed a space filled in with decorative granules--this technique produced striking pictorial compositions. Elements of Germanic feral styles tinged with Scandinavian motifs here and there came up in the images of animals. Necklace pendants in the form of spread-eagled birds were rather popular.

too. There were but few compositions in the style of partition granular filigree--in the 10th century this art was fading away.

Now what concerns the female decor: Slav temple rings were predominant as well pendants in the form of grapes attached to the headdress. Much in use were also crescent and semispherical necklace pendants together with buttons shaped like spheres and cones. However, Scandinavian decor was not much in vogue. Russian beauties from the social elite stuck to traditional Slav fashions.

SCANDINAVIAN INFLUENCES

Scandinavian art styles were found largely in items of belt outfit, weaponry, harnesses and related accouter-ments worthy of high-born and affluent druzhina soldiers. We can see that in the burial dig at Gnezdovo in the Smolensk region still under study since the late eighteen-hundreds, and also in the cache found in 1969 on the site of the Supruty camping grounds in the Tula region. Large annular fibulae supplied with needles and ornamented with images of beasts were used mostly in masculine dresses; such embellishments were done in the Borré feral style* characterized by lavish sculptural decor sexed up with muzzles and paws of beasts, and with human visages, full face. In a way, it was a departure from the traditional Germanic styles with their emphasis on intertwined bands combined in intricate designs. The Borré style, rough and simple, was quite conspicuous in Old Rus art. The perception of such art forms in the 10th century was consonant with the ideas of brutal force, conquest and power, that is quite in keeping with young fervent statehood and its symbols.

The Elling style**, almost contemporaneous with Borré displayed sophisticated designs of twisted, intertwined bands. It came to Rus in the 10th and 11th centuries, when works of Scandinavian masters were perceived as decorative only devoid of symbols. It did not struck deep roots in our land.

These styles were all too involved for imitation; so Rus masters were able to learn but some of the components only. The costumes of Scandinavian kvinnor had

* Named so after a gilded bronze harness dug up in a mound of Borré, at Useberg, Norway; this style was current from the latter half of the 9th to the mid-10th century.--Ed.

** Named so for the residence of Danish kings in the 9th and 10th centuries, and caches recovered there; it appeared in Rus late in the 9th through the mid-10th cent.--Ed.

kept their piecemeal fashion, with pieces of clothing stuck together with shell-like fibulae. The ornamental composition of these clasps was accentuated by a grid of ovals and rhombi, an essential component part of the Borré style. Later on such fibulae adopted twisted bands and stripes in a transition to the Elling style. Special elongated two-piece shoulder fabulae were employed for holding together the flaps of outer garments. Composed of rhombuses, these fibulae matched ideally the grid of ovals and rhombuses.

Another kind of fibulae made up of three pieces-similar to the triangle in form--incorporated one of the components of the Borré style, the raised plaited relief composed of triangular leaves. The design is quite orderly and not as much sophisticated, and thus easy to imitate.

Slav masters of wood- and metalwork adopted Scandinavian ornaments in part and even wholly now and then, without any additions. In the 10th century they were just out to learn what was new to them.

The carved woodwork known from the diggings at Novgorod the Great borrowed the plaited ornament à la Borré to adorn the handles of bowls and the caps of vessels. The rhombic grid was reproduced on wood as well. Metal plates on the harness collar from the Supruty cache were also made after the Borré style, at a rather low level, though.

The Elling style had its heyday in the 11th century; it merged Slav, Byzantine and Scandinavian ornamentation in a creative mode. Follow-up north European styles of the 11th and 12th centuries imported to Russia are known only from single, isolated finds.

Tenth-century Scandinavian styles thus sprouted in Russian art. But they bore different fruits on Russian soil. This is a good example of how outside borrowings are adapted and domesticated.

PLANT ORNAMENTS

Old Rus adopted the European plant style with its lush, "bursting-bud" elements for masculine belt appliances--appliqué badges and clutches. This style, though of Hungarian origins in most cases, was also observed among West Slavs and nomads. Similar variants of this style did not spring from one center, they were local for each particular district: in fact, the art of linear carving or engraving is known to every people. Carved linear forms were used as molds for subsequent chasing.

The plant ornamental style is so natural and logical that any master could learn it given adequate professional skills. This style noted at first for rather frugal, parsimonious ornaments was present as good as everywhere, for one, in belt fixings of the 7th and 8th centuries in the Slav-populated Dnieper region. Actually the same ornaments were still in use late in the 9th and early

in the 10th century. In his article published in 1984 Ruslan Orlov, a Kiev researcher, attributed it to one of the art schools of southern Rus.

Later on the ornaments become more complex: their lines livened up with lavish, exuberant plant designs standing out against the figured edges of an object. Such posh adornments then recurred in any combination.

Masterworks rendered in the plant style with zoomor-phic (animalistic) motifs here and there are known from 10th century finds. Ritual vessels made of aurochs horn supplied with silver bindings recovered from a rich masculine burial at Czarna Mogila (Black Grave) near Mogilev are heavily ornamented. The bindings reflected different decorative plat styles, both simple and lavish ones. Lavish forms are one of the headsources of Old Rus plant ornamentation that gained currency in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

BYZANTINE SWAY

There came another wave of Byzantine plant motifs with their rather rigorous krinon (krinos) style. The name comes from the Greek tó krín or σ krínos for the lily, a flower common in Syria--it was remarkable for a high-rising central leaf. In Christian ornamental culture this flower symbolized prosperity and power. The Russians learned the lily motifs from Byzantine bone and stone carvings. The clear-cut forms of this style and the relative simplicity of its elements done in taut curves made it easier to reproduce such ornamentation. It recurred in Old Rus belts, clothing clasps and pins, temporal rings and weapons. The silver clasps of a caftan (long tunic with a waist-girdle) adorned with tripetal plant shoots found in a rich 10th-century burial at Gulbishche near Chernigov, though still keeping the decorative stylistics, tend toward the krin fashion.

The bird-next-to-the-tree motif was also typical of Christian pictorial art. It was but seldom used during the 10th century, appearing mostly in feminine headgear fixings, namely in radial temple rings. But in the 13th century it invaded old-style princely décor rendered in the partition enamel technique. Such compositions come up in headdress pendants on chains--such items were found in Kievan caches. So, the elitarian art making use of costly materials and creating luxury and prestige things by fine technologies was not yet a mix of styles in the 10th century; rather, it displayed a diversity of styles in search of adequate artistic forms.

LOCAL FERAL IMAGES

In the 10th century independent processes were unfolding in more egalitarian arts. Images of beasts carved on wood were depicted in a quite primitive fashion and simple techniques. A wooden sculpture from Novgorod the Great provides only a sketchy image of a beast, accentuating just most expressive traits. Certain standard techniques came to stay, making it possible to combine schematic representation and decoration. Thus, arched, bow-shaped lines were used in picturing a horse's back or a bird's beak, with simplest ornaments coming up here and there. The mouth and jaws of a beast were drawn in the folk style of three-faceted

groovy carving. The rather easy-to-do techniques of wooden images fostered local traditions and at the same time allowed to jazz them up with alien motifs.

Wood carvings from Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod the Great as well as clay plastic art carried on the tradition of creating idols in anthropomorphic (human) and zoomorphic (animal) carved images portrayed in the spirit of pagan aesthetics: no-frills sculptures, rough, scary features. Such is an anthropomorphic clay statuette retrieved in one of the Gnezdovo burial mounds.

Beasts populate art metalwork, too. Their struggle scenes pop up now and then there. Yet the level of rendition has a long way to go, it is far from perfect. The Russian techniques of the time still lacked state-of-the-art decorative canons of beastly imagery. This is best seen in images on belt appliqués from a 9th-century cache in the village of Zheleznitsy of the Ryazan province (1855) and in a 10th-century cache at Supruty.

There is one striking composition on the abovemen-tioned aurochs horn binding from Czarna Mogila remarkable for rather involved imagery. Taking part in a mythological scene are humans together with fancy and real beasts. Boris Rybakov, a patriarch archeologist and historian, said in 1948 it might be the plot of some Russian fairy-tale or bylina (Russian epic). Summing up the longtime studies of this work. Dr. Vladimir Petrukhin (RAS Institute of Slav Philology) postulated in 2007 that the picture called forth an ancient Eurasian myth, relating a skirmish among soldiers or war-loards. This motif was popular among the Khazarians, next-door nomad neighbors of Rus. Both scholars pointed to certain artistic parallels with the Iranian art. Still, we cannot pinpoint any single foreign style as a source. One technique, though, impacted the art of Old Rus ornamentation in the 12th and 13th centuries: niello*. Done in this technique were many scenes involving the interlaced figures of animals and birds. Human personages take part in scenes related to Slav pagan rites. Such episodes are depicted on bracelets found at Tver in the early nineteen-hundreds and in Old Ryazan in 1966 as well as on headgear pendants

* Niello (Ital. niellos, or black), any of a number of alloys of sulfur with silver, lead, copper, etc., characterized by a deep-black color and used to decorate objects of other metals by means of inlay--Ed.

from a treasure-trove discovered in the Terekhovo village of the Orlov province (1876).

DECORATIVE ELEMENTS OF STATE SYMBOLS

State symbolics likewise felt the intensive impact of ornamental art imported from abroad. Planted on Russian soil, it followed independent development trends and departed from the alien stylistic prototypes.

Symbols of new state religion made their appearance in applied arts with the adoption of Christianity by Rus in 988 as the Byzantine culture started acting on the Slav-Rus mode of life first and foremost in the sphere of religion. Crosses furnished with krin-like geometrical designs on the edges were present on Byzantine and on the first Rus gold coins minted by Kievan Prince Vladimir (ca. 960-1015), the Baptist of Rus. The krin ornamental design thus came to symbolize a connection with the power symbolics. Similar forms were on crosses worn next to the skin and in personal paraphernalia of the religious cult.

The ruling Roerik dynasty of Kievan princes adopted symbols in the shape of bidents or tridents, with each prince opting for definite symbols which were the impressed on personal belongings of the retinue, e.g., on trapezoidal pendants. Household utensils and tools of the princely court were marked likewise. The trident was framed by curvatures that could go over into plaited plant ornaments or avian images. Different variations of such decoration were not materialized to an equal measure. Plaiting highlighted objects made in the 10th-century Scandinavian style. However, the Byzantine plant-frills ornamentation became the in-trend.

The krin-lily design came to stay for a long time as a hallmark of Russian applied arts and an emblem of the princely host. For instance, a plant image like that done in the technique of gilded silver encrustation on iron is the centerpiece on the facial part of a 10th-century helm mask discovered by chance in Kiev in the late eighteen-hundreds.

The sketchy image of a spread-eagled bird decorated sword sheaths and coin-like pendants as a prototype of the state heraldry to be; this emblem is related both to Byzantine and to Scandinavian influences. Pagan art styles of pre-Christian Rus fade away, the Byzantine spread-eagled bird asserts itself.

The end of the 10th century saw the appearance of the oldest regalia of supreme power of the princes. The

head crown of Kievan Prince Vladimir is impressed on Russia's first coins minted in 980 to 1015. His crown was made after the Byzantine model of the diadem worn by Emperor Constantine Monomachos of Constantinople (ca. 1000-1055) and impressed on Byzantine gold nómisma coins in 1042 to 1055; such coins are in the collection of the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Vladimir's regal crown comprised a diadem linked to cruciform hoops supporting the crown on the head from above. Three-dimensional pendants are fixed in front, right and left. They no long served as strings to lace the diadem on the back of the head. Vladimir's crown must have been adorned with plates of Byzantine partition enamel. Such enamel pieces came to play a major part in the Russian art of the late 11th and 12th centuries. The lush enamel attire studded with gems was put on by the top ruling elite, while partition enamel became virtually a state branch of the applied art industry.

Tenth-century works demonstrate a spectrum of coexisting pure style trends catering to clients and masters alike. Different sources of art did not merge into one single national style in the 10th century, and it was not clear enough which of the trends would emerge supreme. Today we know which lines came to be further developed in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Be that as it may, the 10th-century art paved the way for the subsequent flourishing of Old Rus applied arts.

Used in this article are pictures from books by B. Kolchin Novgorodian Antiquities: Carved Wood. Moscow, 1971; by B. Rybakov Russian Applied Arts of 10th to 13th Cent. Leningrad, 2012; The Sword and the Gold Coins. Moscow, 2012; Rus in the 9th to 10th Cent. Archeological Panorama. Moscow, 2012