Russell to Speak on ‘Animal Style in Art: From Scythia to Aghtamar’

BELMONT, Mass.—On Thurs., May 30, Dr. James R. Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, will give an illustrated lecture entitled, “The Animal Style in Art: From Scythia to Aghtamar to Modern Russian Literature,” at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) in Belmont. The lecture will be given in honor of the 90^th birthday of Prof. Nina G. Garsoian, the Avedissian Professor Emerita of Armenian History and Civilization at Columbia University and the director of the “Revue des Etudes Armeniennes” in Paris.

Built in AD 920, the Church of the Holy Cross on Aghtamar island in Lake Van famously features a spectacular bas-relief sculptural program on its outer walls, where we find antic animals strikingly reminiscent of images from Scythian art, wrought in gold, of the ancient world. The impression one takes away from Scythian art is of the pleasure of movement, the beauty of the kinetic body. And if one recalls that much of this art was meant to be portable, often to adorn a rider and his mount, it is understandable that it celebrated the galloping horse, the swooping falcon, the hare or stag in full flight.

If the Animal Style, which endured for many centuries past the Classical age, found its way from gold to stone, with perhaps a quick stopover in Sasanian Iran, it is surely at home in Armenia. Tracing the imagery of Scythia and Aghtamar’s Church of the Holy Cross and following it into Russian art and literature, Russell will pursue the meanings and repercussions of this pattern of animal imagery, in visual art and in the written word.

Russell has been the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard since 1992. His books include Bosphorus Nights: The Complete Lyric Poems of Bedros Tourian, Armenian and Iranian Studies, The Book of Flowers, An Armenian Epic: The Heroes of Kasht, Zoroastrianism in Armenia, and Hovhannes Tlkurantsi and the Medieval Armenian Lyric Tradition.

Garsoian received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1943 and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946 and 1958, respectively, in Byzantine, Near Eastern, and Armenian history. Garsoian was the first female dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University and a two-term trustee of the Ford Foundation.

The talk begins at 7:30 p.m. For more information, call 617-489-1610 or e-mail hq@naasr.org.