Russian Culture I

The course deals with Russian popular prints, also known as "lubok". This artistic genre, widespread in many European countries since the Sixteenth century, appears in Russia in the first half of the Seventeenth century and remains until the beginning of the Soviet epoch. The term "popular" indicates, on the one hand, the social stratum of both the artists-craftsmen producing the prints as well as the target group (peasants, urban lower middle-class); on the other hand, the term refers to the course, not much elaborated make of the pictures (as opposed to the sophisticated professional academic art); finally, the term "popular" indicates also the great number of copies published and the broad distribution of the prints, making them a kind of mass media of the epoch.

The lubok contains usually both figurative and textual elements. The cours will deepen the principal aspects of the subject by analysing the visual and narrative elements of the most significative Russian popular prints. The prints reflect the people's tastes and reality, constituting a very important source for the study of Russian mentality and manners. The cours deals with the following aspects of the subject area: the story and the development of the genre, different artistic techniques, the principal thematical fields and central motifs, the connections with popular prints in Western Europe.