Evargis ( 11th Century )

Last Supper from the Gospels by the Evargis, Taron, 1038

Sources
L'art armenien de l'ourartou a nos jours : oct. 1970-jan. 1971
An annotated list of Armenian New Testament manuscripts bz Erroll Franklin Rhodes
Dept. of Christian Studies, Rikkyo University, 1959 - Bible - 192 pages

Etchmiadzin Gospels

Annunciation to thе Virgin, Etchmiadzin Gospels, 6th-7th century.

Jirayr Zorthian ( 1911-2004 )

The Shipwreck, suggested by the burning of the Murro Castle, was painted by Jirayr Hamparzoom Zorthian, an Armenian who worked his way through Yale's School of Fine Arts doing carpentry and posing for art classes.

Jirayr used to be a wrestler.He attended anatomy classes at Yale's medical school, dissected a cadaver to study muscles for figures in this picture. Since graduating in 1936, Jirayr has been continuously employed painting murals.

From
LIFE - 12 Feb 1940

Bogos Chachian

The Ottoman empire was represented by three important publications, one of which was L Architecture Ottomane ( Usul-u mimari-i Osmani, ),  the fruit of the collaboration of Marie de Launay, Pietro Montani, Adolphe Maillard and the Ottoman Armenian Painter Bogos Chachian.L Architecture Ottomane were provided by Pietro Montani (or Montani Efendi), an Ottoman Levantine artist of Italian origin.The Technical Documents in the Usul constituting a separate section entitled “The Theory of Ottoman Architecture”, were provided by Pietro Montani (or Montani Efendi), an Ottoman Levantine artist of Italian origin.Montani also executed most of the drawings and color plates, with the exception of a few plans by Marie de Launay and some additional renderings of decorative components by the French artist Eugène Maillard and the Ottoman Armenian painter Bogos Chachian.

Sources
Muqarnas, Volume 24
Istanbul 1900:
art-nouveau architecture and interiors by Diana Barillari, Ezio Godoli
Usul-u mimari-i Osmani

Avedis Mouradian ( 1895-? )

Avedis Mouradian was an Armenian artist who lived in Jerusalem as well as in Nice, France. He was in Jerusalem around 1930 and made a few oil paintings of the city. Two excellent examples are in the Collection.He is mentioned in the bibliography of Armenian artists, Les Peintrcs Armeniens (p. 288).

Jerusalem, Facade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 1930, Oil on canvas, 56 x 41 cm. Inscribed on board on reverse and dated 1930.

From
Palestine and Egypt Under the Ottomans: Paintings, Books, Photographs, Maps, Manuscripts
By Hisham Khatib

Armenian Gospel by Astuacatur ( 1317 )

Armenian Bible

 Copied by the scribe Astuacatur in 1317 and deposited in the church at the Holy Astuacacin at Karbi. Last owner, archdeacon Sargis and his brother, renewed and rebound it and presented it to the church of St Sargis.

The Armenian paper codex contains seven sideways oriented fully painted scenes on the lite of Christ.These are incorporated as full- page images in the beginning of the codex." 

 Source
The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith By Susan Whitfield, British Library

Sarkis Sarkisian (1909-1977)

Sarkis Sarkisian has become an artistic beacon not only for Detroit and Michigan but also for the promise of America. He was born in Smyrna in 1909, and came to Detroit in 1923 at the age of 14. His formal studies were performed under John P. Wicker at the Wicker School of Fine Arts and for the next fifty years he grew steadily into a leadership role in the artistic community of the city.

Portrait of Anna Werbe

Sarkisian studied for one year with John Carroll at the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts and, in 1934, became a painting instructor there. He continued teaching for over thirty years and was named director of the art school in 1947, a position held until his retirement in 1967.

From
Sarkis by Gordon Orear, Sarkis, Elizabeth Orear

Armenian Miniature Painting from 17th century

The seventeenth century in the Armenian communities in Constantinople, the Crimea, and Isfahan saw a renaissance in the art of manuscript illumination.For the first time wealthy Armenians ordered Bibles extensively illuminated with images inspired by earlier Armenian manuscript traditions and European printed books.' According to the principal colophon, this Bible was commissioned in Constantinople by Khodja Nazar (or Nazar Agha), a member of an important family in Isfahan, and completed in 1623; the copyist was named Hakob. During the fighting in the early seventeenth century between Iran and the Turks, Shah 'Abbas I ( 1589-1629) relocated to Iran and the Turks, in 1603, a portion of the Eastern Armenian population.The Armenians were settled in a quarter of Isfahan that they called New Julfa, in memory of their native city.Elaborate manuscripts like this were commissioned from the more established Armenian scriptoria in Constantinople.When the Bibles arrived in New Julfa, they quickly became models for other works, such as the similarly illuminated New Julfa Bible of 1645 now owned by the Armenian Patriarchate Jerusalem.

This Bible consists of 609 folios, 30 miniatures, illuminated canon tables and headpieces, and numerous illuminated ornaments.The text, in Armenian, is in two columns of forty-seven lines each, written in minuscule script called bolorgir.The title of each book of the Bible appears in the lower margin of the page below an elaborate headpiece.The frontispiece to the Old Testament depicts the six days of the Creation (in six medallions) and the Creation of Man, Eve Taken from Adam's Rib, the Warning concerning the Forbidden Fruit, the Temptation of the Serpent, and the Expulsion from Eden.The headpiece of the Book of Genesis on the facing page refers to the Apocalypse, with the Lamb of God flanked by seraphim. Below, Christ Pantokrator appears in the central medallion.The rays emanating from His hands enclose the Holy Spirit in a medallion to the lower left and Moses in a medallion to the lower right, before descending upon twelve haloed heads on each side, which probably represent the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse.The initial letter of the chapter is formed by a man with a halo grasping a child to his breast with his left arm. In his raised right hand he holds а gilded book upon which a haloed eagle perches, the symbol of John the Evangelist. The outer margin is decorated with intertwined palms crowned by a cross. The remaining miniatures in this Bible represent Old Testament figures, the Evangelists, and other New Testament saints. Numerous decorative compositions confer great richness on this manuscript, a characteristic example of the works executed in Constantinople in the seventeenth century.

From
Only the Best: Masterpieces of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon
 By Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

Sarkis Zabunyan ( 1938 )

Artist of Armenian origin, Sarkis Zabunyan, or Sarkis, as he is known, was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and settled in Paris in 1964. He works painted close to the Figurative narrative style, then, after discovering conceptual art and the works of German artist Joseph Beuys, created installations with solid materials (spools, felt) that are charged with energy.

Calendar, 1994, 56x36.5 cm

Sarkis has willingly adapted the military aesthetic (going as far as to paint water tanks with camouflage colors), archaeology (rearranging archaeological labels to contradictory places), the cinema, and music.His series Kriegshatz, begun in 1976, represents his synthesis of research done on the memory of locations.

Sources
France: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present
By William J. Roberts
Armenian Painting: From the Beginning to the Present
By Mayda Saris

Kutahya Ceramics and Armenian Artisans

The production of ceramics in urban centers such as Kutahya, in Anatolia, where Armenians settled toward the end of of the fourteenth century, is to a large degree the result of the Ottoman appreciation for fine ceramics and of the declining quality of the work being produced elsewhere in Turkey-for instance, in Iznik.It is not widely known that in the sixteenth century Armenians were producing some ceramics— as is proven by the ewer and water bottle with with Armenian inscriptions, from 1510 and 1529, now in the British Museum,London.A considerable number of Christian Armenian craftsmen, who had contributed to the flourishing of Iznik ceramics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, moved to the Anatolian interior, settling principally in Kutahya.

Bowl, 18th century

Kutahya ceramics are characterized by a siliceous paste without engobe, by an alkaline-lead glaze, and by a varied palette in  which yellows and greens, sometimes slightly acid in tone, predominate. Although the technique and decoration of Kutahya ceramics were inspired by Iznik wares, their originality resides in their use of yellow (achieved through a secret process originating in Greater Armenia) and in their relatively abundant religious motifs.In both public and private collections there are candelabra, pilgrim's flasks, bowls decorated with figures of the apostles, and other objects with the monogram of Christ or stylized seraphim intended for religious use. In addition, tiles covered  the walls of the cathedral and other churches in the New Julfa quarter of Isfahan and of the cathedral of Saint James in Jerusalem.

This bowl is decorated in green, yellow, and aubergine against a white ground. Its central element is a large rosette in the form of a six-pointed star, around which fish move in a circle. The bowl may have been meant for secular use. Fish, however, were a symbol of the early Christian church, and bowls decorated on the interior with fish are known to have been used for the distribution of the Eucharist to the faithful.

From
Only the Best: Masterpieces of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon
 By Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

Magakya Komurciyan (1662-1702?)

Armenian Churches, 1691, 358x120cm

The map was commissioned in 1691 by the Austrian Ambassador Count Luigi (Lodovico) Ferdinando Marsili (1658-1730).

Source
Armenian painters in the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1923, Volume 2
Garo Kürkman

Armenian Influence in Italian Art

Influence at Cremona from the East and particularly from Armenia cannot be excluded. For centuries pilgrims had come and gone to Jerusalem, and after the occupation of Armenia by the Turks about 1060 there had been an influx of Armenian refugees into North Italy; and this connection was further developed after the establishment of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem at the beginning of the twelfth century, which had as a result active trading relations between the new kingdom and the commercial centres of Italy, Venice, Genoa and Pisa.

Achtamar, Holy Cross Church

There was an emigration of Armenians to the West. Armenians became numerous in Italy, as the Armenian churches which came to be founded in Florence, Rome and other towns indicate. In Armenia, as is known from recent research, architecture and sculpture flourished in forms closely resembling the Romanesque art in the West. Ideas as well as commercial products must have passed from East to West. No direct precedents for portal statues can be found in Armenia.

Saint Mary ( Italian Church ) in North Italy

Funerary stelae with large figures in high relief are illustrated by Baltrusaitis and dated by him to the fifth or sixth century; at Achthamar human figures in relief frame a window and at Elindsche reliefs of St. Peter and St. Paul are set against a wall on either side of a doorway in a frontal position. This work is of an ornamental rather than architectural character but the idea of a column is implicit.

From
Romanesque Sculpture in Italy

Torcom Bedayan (1917-1986)

"B" Battery Bivouac

"This is reminiscent of our bivouac near Soledad, Calif.," says Armenian Artist Bedayan, who won a $50 award. "I tried to capture the simple ruggedness of soldiers and landscape, to depict a soldier's loneliness without painting any figures.


Source
LIFE - 6 July 1942

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948)

 Arshile Gorky was born Vos- danig Manoog Adoian in Khorkom. Armenia, to Sedrag Adoian and Shushanik der Marderosian. He attended local schools. In 1915 he fled the Turkish genocide of Armenians, finally immigrating to America in 1920.In 1925 Gorky moved to New York City and changed his name to honor the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, to whom he often pretended to be related. Arshile is the Armenian form of Achilles. He studied at the National Academy of Design and the Grand Central School of Art, where he taught 1926 to early 1940 s.

Enigmatic Combat

Arshile Gorky has long been recognized as an important figure in 20th Century American art. After a long period of voluntary apprenticeship to such modern masters as Cezanne, Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and others, Gorky reached his artistic reached his artistic maturity only in the early 1940s (he died in 1948 at the age of 44) when he blossomed as a highly original and imaginative artist, and created a body of work noted for its exquisite and haunting beauty.its exquisite and haunting beauty. At the same time, his understanding of European modernism enabled him to play a crucial role in the development of the new American painting which came into international prominence during the 1950s.

Sources
Orange Coast Magazine Feb 1982
Encyclopedia of New Jersey edited by Maxine Lurie

Mesrop of Khizan ( 17th century )

The Harrowing of Hell

Mesrop of Khizan was one of several artists who worked primarily in Isfahan but who consistently called themselves Khizants'i, or "from Khizan."' Mesrop had learned illumination, copying, and binding in the scriptoria of Khizan.


Source
Book arts of Isfahan: diversity and identity in seventeenth-century Persia
Alice Taylor, J. Paul Getty Museum

Sarkis Diranian (1860-1918)

Portrait by Sarkis Diranian

Sarkis Diranian was born in Constantinople.He studied at Guillemet's academy in 1875. In 1883 he exhibited his work titled "The Sorceress" at the photographic studio of the Abdullah Brothers.Upon its sale, he used the proceeds to finance his studies at the Fine Arts faculty in Paris.Sarkis Diranian participated in the Salons of the Society of French Artists where he received an honorable mention in 1892 and another in 1900.

Source
Peintres et sculpteurs arméniens, du 19eme siècle à nos jours
By Onnik Awetisian

Hovhannes Zardaryan (1918-1992)

Hovhannes Zardaryan was colourist Armenian painter, also a member of USSR Academy of Arts , Academician of the USSR Academy of Arts.

Hovhannes Zardaryan was born January 8, 1918, in Kars (now Turkey) in a family of craftsmen. During the Armenian genocide, the family takes refuge Zardaryan first in Armavir, Krasnodar and then finally settled in 1920 in Tiflis, where, at age 15, Hovhannes began his studies at the Georgian Academy of Fine arts. In 1933 he moved to Yerevan, where he continued his studies at the College of Fine Arts (later specialized Terlemezyan School) under the leadership of Armenian painters Vahram Arakelyan and Sedrak Gayfezdjian.

Rupen Manas (1810-1875)

Sebuh Manas (1816-1889), a brother of Rupen, and another Manas named Jozef (1835-1916) both served as court artists during the reigns of Mahmud II (1808-1839), Abdulmecid I (1839-1861), Abdulaziz (1861-1876) and Abdulhamid ll (1876-1909).

Portrait of Abdulmecid I

Most notably, imperial portraitist Rupen Manas, chief interpreter at the Ottoman Embassy in Paris in 1847, received a Mecidiye medal in 1854, while his brother Sebuh Manas, also an imperial portraitist, received one the following year.The Manas brothers were assigned in the Ottoman embassy in Paris, the portraits made by Rupen Manas (181 0?- 1 875) were distributed to other embassies in Europe. Abdulmecid gave orders for a series of oil portraits of all the Ottoman sultans before him to the artist Portet. These portraits made to be exhibited in the palace are still in the Topkapi Palace.During this period interest in things Western manifested itself also in the art of painting. Mahmut II sent Rupen Manas to Paris for training in art. He had his own portrait done in oils by this artist and then had it displayed at the Sublime Porte.

Sources
Armenian painters in the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1923. by Garo Kurkman
Orientalism and Turkey, Semra Germaner, Zeynep İnankur - 1989

Mkrtum Hovnatanian (1779-1846)

Mkrtum Hovnatanian was born in a family of Hovnatanian ( Famous Armenian artists) . As the son of Ovnatan Hovnatanian, lived and worked in Tbilisi.He painted religious paintings, executed a series of images of the Armenian kings and generals.

Portrait of a priest (unknown)

Photo is from National Gallery of Armenia, Gallery.Am

Sources
"Popular Art Encyclopedia" 2nd book, publishing house "Soviet Encyclopedia", 1986 
 M. Kazarian "Artists Hovnatanian" Moscow, 1969

Naghash Hakob Hovnatanian (1692-1757)

Naghash Hakob Hovnatanian was a son and student of Hovnatan Nagash, was born in Yerevan, from 1710 lived in Tiflis. Together with his father ( Hovnatan Nagash )and brother (Harutyun Hovnatanian (1706 -?)  painted a Cathedral in Echmiadzin and a few churches in Yerevan.He was also a miniaturist which was tradition for his family.




Sources 
"Popular Art Encyclopedia" 2nd book, publishing house "Soviet Encyclopedia", 1986 
M. Kazarian "Artists Hovnatanian" Moscow, 1969

Treasures from the Matenadaran Museum

Portraits of the four Evangelists from the Gospels by Melk'isedek, Berkri, north-eastern shore of Lake Van, 1338. Matenadaran, Erevan, ms. 4813, f.5v. 2

The Holy Women at the Empty Tomb with the Risen Christ, from the Gospels by the artist Ewagris, Taron, 1038. Matenadaran, Erevan, ms. 6201

The Washing of the Feet, the Last Supper, the Betrayal by Judas, Peter cutting the servant's car and denving Christ to the servant girl. From the Gospels by Rstakes, Khizan, 1397. Matenadaran, Erevan, ms. 7629, f. 267. 37.Illuminated. by. Rstakes,. 1397. Paper; 267 fols. Script bolorgir in double cols; 27.5 x 18.5 cm Provenance: In the scribal colophon (fol. 265v) the scribe and artist Rstakes states that he copied the manuscript from a choice choice and reliable copy

Etchmiadzin Gospel, manuscript," 989, Dimension is 35x28 cm, M2374.The unique remnant of Armenian miniature painting from the period before the Arab occupation consists of two folios bearing four full-page miniatures called today the "Final Miniatures" of the Etchmiadzin Gospels because they were bound in at the end of the latter codex executed

Gospel,Artist Toros Roslin, Cilicia, XIIIth century, Annunciation. Erevan, Matenadaran, MS 9422

Portraits of Mekhitar Heratsi and Catholicos Nerses Shnorhali (MS. 7046). Mekhitar Heratsi was a 12th century priest and physician who wrote an encyclopedia on medicine. In Consolation of Fevers, Heratsi introduced the theory of mold [mucus, phlegm] as a cause of infections and allergic diseases, and suggested that diseases could penetrate into the body from the outer world. Heratsi wrote works about anatomy, biology, general pathology, pharmacology, ophthalmology, and curative properties of stones.

Sources
The Bible in the Armenian Tradition by: Vrej Nersessian
http://armenianstudies.csufresno.edu
Matenadaran.Am

Hovhannes Rustemian (Jan Rustem 1762--1835)

Jan Rustem was a Polish portrait painter of Armenian descent(1), a professor at the Vilnius University.

Self-Portrait of Hovhannes Rustemian

He came to Poland as a ten year old orphan at the invitation of General Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski. He studied painting in Warsaw with Jean-Pierre de la Norblin Gourdaine, Marcello Bacciarelli later. 1788 to 1790 he spent in Germany, where he was accepted into a Masonic Lodge.  

Portrait of Krystyna Frank

Then he came to Lithuania in 1794 to Warsaw, in 1798 he settled permanently in Lithuania, a few years ago part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.He became an assistant at the Department of Franciszek Smuglewicz painting of the Vilnius University. In 1811 he was associate professor of drawing, painting in 1819 for, in 1821 he was appointed full professor.

Portrait of Maria Mirska and Barbara

He dealt mainly with portraiture, created numerous self portraits. He also painted landscapes, mythological and historical scenes, designed sets and costumes for the theater Vilna.


 
Sources 
(1)Nineteenth century Polish painting by Agnieszka Morawińska, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, Barbara Brus-Malinowska

Encyclopedia Lituanica , Volume 6
Stefania Krzysztofowicz-Kozakowska: Malarstwo Polskie w zbiorach za granicą, (Polnische Malerei in ausländischen Sammlungen), Wydawnictwo Kluszczyński, 2003

Ervand Kochar (1899–1979)

Ervand Kochar was a likeable and many-sided personality, equally talented as a painter and as a sculptor. His equestrian statue of the legendary Armenian hero David of Sassoun rears up in front of Yerevan railway station.

An immensely gifted artist, he had lived and worked in Paris from 1923 until 1936 but then, although highly successful  there, he returned to Soviet Armenia. After his return he was accused of the Soviet crime of formalism and suffered periods of imprisonment.

Sources
The Armenians:a people in exile by David Marshall Lang
Armenia with Nagorno Karabagh by By Nicholas Holding, Deirdre Holding

Sergey Merkurov (1881-1952)

Sergiy Merkurov was a major Armenian-Soviet sculptor.Also, Sergei Merkurov was a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, People's Artist of the Council of the Republic , and from 1944 until 1949 Pushkin literary arts in the museum's director. Merkurovi especially appreciated the Soviet era the greatest sculptor.

In 1984 his family opened the house Merkurov Museum, with displays of fifty-nine Merkurovin's mask, famous personalities and leaders of the Council, among them Lenin. Merkurovin issuing at two multiplied by the mask, one of which he himself saved. The museum is located Gjumrissa, Armenia.

Jean Carzou: Garnik Zulumyan (1907–2000)

If Ivan Aivazovsky is Armenia's best-known 19th-century painter outside the country , the best-known 20th-century one is probably Garnik Zulumyan, also known as Carzou (1907–2000). He worked as a stage designer as well as a painter and engraver and his paintings do often reflect a decorative and theatrical quality.

Claiming that Picasso was no painter at all, he claimed the only truly great painters were Claude Lorrain, Watteau and Dalí.Carzou's response to the Armenian earthquake of 1988 was the painting Armenia: Earthquake. Hope, in which a naked woman is shown standing over ruins against a background of Armenian buildings and mountains.

From
Armenia with Nagorno Karabagh - Page 48, Nicholas Holding, Deirdre Holding

Zakar Zakarian (1849-1923)

Still life with coffee grinder

Zakar Zakarian was one of the pioneers of the still life in the Armenian painting.Less well known today but highly regarded in his time, lstanbul- born Zakar Zakarian was active mainly in Paris, where he had his first exhibition in 1879, after which he decided to interrupt his medical studies and devote his full time to art.


Source
Photo is from, Gallery.Am

Gevorg Bashinjagyan (1857-1920)

In the nineteenth century, the tradition contiuned of Armenian painters travelling to Europe or Russia to study in Fine Arts Academies.The late nineteenth-century Armenian painter Gevorg Bashinjagyan left Signakhi, Georgia, to pursue art in Saint Petersburg. 

Gevork Bashinjaghian developed the painting of landscapes with his calm, serene views.

He graduated from the Academy in Saint Petersburg, with a silver medal (awarded for his film "Birch Grove"), which gave him the right to receive scholarships to travel to Europe ( In 1884 - Italy and Switzerland ). Then the rest of his life he lived in Tiflis, leaving out in different areas of the Caucasus.

 Source
Rethinking Arshile Gorky

Paul Guiragossian (1926–1993)

 The development, since the late 1940s, of a tradition of Armenian figurative arts in Lebanon filled a gap in the reconstruction of an Armenian cultural world in the country and enriched the image of Beirut as a hub of Armenian culture in Diaspora.

In painting, the Armenian-Lebanese artistic movement arguably began with the arrival in Beirut of a young, Jerusalem-born son of refugees: Paul Guiragossian. Initially self-taught, and then artistically educated in Italy, , Guiragossian managed to elaborate a personal style that drew inspiration from the European tradition of authors like Goya, Daumier, Van Gogh but also from the Oriental tradition of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Byzantium and Armenia, and rapidly imposed himself as one of the most promising artists on the Lebanese scene.

 Life in the Armenian camps and quarters (Baraque, camp Amanos, 1948; Funerailles à Bourj Hammoud, 1948; L'Eglise St. Joseph, Bourj Hammoud, 1949), the 1915 deportations and his own family life (Juliette et Mano, 1955; La famille, 1957) were the main themes of his work, all bound together by the experience of the Genocide.

Source
Reconstructing Armenia in Lebanon and Syria by Nicola Migliorino

Yervant Oskan (1855-1914)

During the years when Fine Arts Academy of Istanbul opened in 1883, the only sculptor in the country was Yervant Oskan , who had returned after being educated in Rome.The sculptor Yervant Oskan was one of the instrumental founders of the School. While the reading is interesting, there is no reference to the role and the ratio of non-Turkish students in the Imperial School.The earliest three-dimensional sculptures of the human figure on Turkish art ( in Western norms )appeared after the foundation of the Academy, which soon became the most important center for the plastic arts in Turkey, an institution of repute in which culture and the arts flourished from the late Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic.

Portrait of Naile Hanim

Yervant Oskan and his pupil Ilhan Ôzsoy (1867-1944) were the first instructors in sculpture at the school. Their academic method was based on the instruction they had received in Rome and Paris.Also Yervant Oskan was coauthor with the famous Turkish painter Osman Hamdi Bey of a book about the Tomb of Antiochus and archaeological excavations on Mount Nemrud.

Source
Turcica, Volumes 35-36

Tserun (14th and 15th cent.)

One manuscript in particular summarizes the cohesion between Armenian aesthetic, literary, and religious traditions. Rendered by the late- fourteenth-century artist Tserun, it shows a teacher holding up a tablet — a bnag — printed with the Armenian alphabet, presenting the sacred letters to two wide-eyed students whose hands open eagerly to receive the language(fig. 1).

Fig. 1

 Neither cynicism nor skepticism mar the miniature; with clarity and charm, its depicts the transmission of cultural traditions through the written word.Vaspurakan miniatures were based on symbolic dogmatism accompanied by certain elements of folk art imagery. This combination accounts for the distinguishing features of their iconography and of their subjects: namely, the great role played by images linked with ancient symbolism and apocryphal legends.

They are also remarkable for their stylistic features: the general composition and the treatment of individual scenes are determined by the essentially linear character of drawing.The line as the main expressive device is supported by rich and clear colours.The lack of perspective in the composition and drawing, typical of medieval art in general, is more conspicuous in the Vaspurakan miniatures than elsewhere.


Sources
The Magical Pine Ring by Margaret Bedrosian 
Armenian miniatures of the 13th centuries and 1th collection from the Matenadaran, Yerevan