According to the generally accepted view there were no stainedglass windows in ancient Russian religious architecture. This opinion is undoubtedly based on the absence of stained-glass sets in the then-existing temples that have survived to this day. The information collected by the author of the article, on the contrary, testifies to the use of stained-glass windows in the architecture of Ancient Rus. One of such testimonies is the discovery of three stained-glass windows in the Yaroslavl’ Kremlin, in the cultural layers of the first half of the 13th century. To establish the place of production, the windows were studied using optical emission spectrography. The analysis in all three cases showed the same chemical composition — wood-ash lead glass. This type of glass was imported to Rus’, and is well known in stained glass windows of the twelfth–fifteenth centuries proceeding from what is now Germany and Austria. An additional argument for the non-local origin of the Yaroslavl’ finds is the use of casting and rolling techniques in the manufacture of glass. The present study makes it possible to expand the geography of the distribution of glass with the indicated composition, which, until recently, was mainly limited to the area of Central Europe. The uniformity of all the characteristics of the stained-glass finds indicates that they belong to a single set of stained-glass windows. Most likely, they were used in the Assumption Cathedral, the only stone building that existed in Yaroslavl’ in the pre-Mongolian period. It was founded, according to chronicles, in 1215 by the Rostov prince Konstantin Vsevolodovich. The question of how stained-glass windows from German-speaking countries ended up in Yaroslavl’ was resolved owing to the art history research by V.V. Sedov, who established that the Assumption Cathedral in the capital of the principality, Rostov, was founded by the same prince Konstantin Vsevolodovich in 1213 and built with the participation of Romanesque — apparently German — craftsmen who worked on creating the decor of the building. This suggests that the German craft smen also took part in the decoration of the Yaroslavl’ Cathedral, and this was why the material for future stained-glass compositions was brought to Rus’..

The technological processes involved in the production of cloisonné enamels, despite long-standing scholarly interest, have not yet been fully clarified. The present article aims to address some of the complexities of this problem by drawing on written evidence, above all the treatise of Theophilus, as well as on the results of scientific investigations of selected archaeological finds bearing enamels. The analysis suggests that Theophilus’s description of the technological sequence for producing enamelled objects corresponds to enamels manufactured primarily in Europe and also in China. In the international literature, these are designated as Zellenemail: in this technique, meta l cloisons are soldered to the surface of a metal (typically gold) plaque with a frame soldered along its edge, and the resulting cells are filled with enamels so as to leave no exposed metal ground. A second typ e of enamel, whose origins are associated with Byzantium, is referred to in the international literature as Senkemail. Here, the cloisons are soldered to the floor of a recess sunk into a gold plaque, or produced by a more complex procedure in which the outline of the future image is cut out in the plaque and a trough-like backing is soldered on from below. As a result, the enamelled image is set against a gold background. In Russian-language scholarship, these types of enamel are not normally distinguished; the single term cloisonné (l’émail cloisonné) is applied to both. In the territories of early Rus’, enamels of the Byzantine Senkemail type are most widely attested. This circumstance appears to have contributed to confusion in attempts to reconstruct the relevant technologies on the basis of Theophilus’s text, which described the method for producing Zellenemail. The examination of several bronze archaeological objects with enamels from the territory of Vladimir-Suzdal’ Rus’ has shown that in these pieces the cloisons were not soldered either to the plaque or to the floor of a recess; rather, they were applied only after the enamelled images had already been created. The author interprets this mode of manufacture, in combination with the use of a relatively inexpensive metal — bronze — as an imitation of costly gold ornaments. It may be further hypothesized that the application of metal details onto the enamel surface to render folds of garments and drapery was also employed in the technology of Byzantine gold enamels of the Senkemail type.