Abstract

The article examines the origin of non-trivial images of the Evangelists’ symbols in the form of half-figures of anthropomorphic three-faced cherubim, which are known in Russian illuminated Gospels from 1560s through 1590s, on the silver covers of a small group of the early seventeenth-century Holy Table Gospels and in some iconographic works. The author finds the source of these images in a Slavonic translation of Anastasius of Sinai’s Against the Arian, which is included in the Izbornik of Svyatoslav, dated to 1073, the second-oldest surviving old Russian manuscript. In this work, Anastasius of Sinai echoes the opinion of Irenaeus of Lyon, who explained the fourfold number of the Gospels by linking it to the four faces of the cherubim, i.e., the faces of the four animals described in the Book of Ezekiel. These animals came to be perceived later as symbols of the Gospels and the Evangelists. In the old Slavonic translation, the cherub was called three-faced instead of four-faced due to an erroneous confusion of numerical values of the Glagolitic letters in the original of the Izbornik and Cyrillic characters in the 1073 manuscript. In Glagolitic the letter “Glagol” has the numerical value “four”, while in Cyrillic it is “three”. This error was not always corrected in the manuscript copies up to the 18th century, and it generated a limited iconographic tradition in Vologda and other regions of the Russian North as far as one can judge from the surviving works. This article deals with the full-page miniatures of three Russian Tetragospels from the State Historical Museum and the Russian National Library, three silver emblazoned Gospels from the Moscow Kremlin Museums, the Perm State Art Gallery and the Arkhangelsk Regional Museum. The text of Anastasius of Sinai’s Against the Arians is examined in fifteen copies from the 11th through the 18th century

References

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