The River Roussenski Lorn

The manifestations of this Renaissance, the penetration and revival of interest in antiquity, the striving to bring contemporary art closer to it, are plainly visible in the murals of one of the rupestral churches near the village of Ivanovo, Rousse district. The River Roussenski Lorn, cutting deep into the soft limestone rocks, has formed a wide canyon here, sunoundcd by walls up to 50 m. in height. Many caves were foimed in these almost perpendicular rocks, and in the 13th and 14th centuries entire colonies of monks and hermits lock refuge in them, enlarging the natural caves, and adapting them to use as cells or churches. In these rock cells, chapels and churches inhabited by Hezychasts and mystics who had given up life, far from the centres of cultural life, an art made its way, the votaries of which had a totally different attitude to the reality around them.

They sought this reality, they tried to attain it and recreate it in their work. This was the art of people who knew how to enjoy life, all that nature, and man in the first place, has created. So man appears in these murals not only in the person of biblical characters with their garments and poses painted according to the strict canons of church painting, but chiefly as a living natural form with his specific dynamics, with his free characteristic and expressive movements city tour istanbul. Man’s living body appears for the foist time partly naked here (some of the servants in the scene of Christ’s betrayal), and quite naked in the presentation of the two Atlantes.

Roussenski Lorn

The bodies are instinct with life and strength. They are not the withered, tortured and powerless bodies we have known so far. The artist who painted the Ivanovo murals was a great artist, and life on earth was closer to his heart than life in paradise after death, the life of which the inhabitants of the rupestral hermitage above the banks of the Roussenski Lorn dreamt and preached. This well-schooled artist was acquainted with classicism and entirely taken up with its new trends in Bulgarian art; he gave full expression to them in his work on the rupestral church of Ivanovo, where the attempt to return to the aesthetics of antique art are clearly apparent.

Art in West Bulgaria was of a totally different character at that time. Here the influence of the Turnovo school was comparatively slight. It was chiefly masters from the western regions of Bulgaria, from Macedonia, who worked here. Under the influence of their art a local school came into being, which was based on the traditions of a folk art with the linear and mainly decorative style typical of it, inbued with a sound and fresh, though often naive and primitive, realism. The mmals of the Zemen Monastery, 70 km. to the south of Sofia on the road to Radomir, are typical examples of this art. The church is a small cruciform- cupolaed one, with a square foundation, three apses to the east and a cupola on a high drum. Theouter walls are divided into sec – ticns by three recessed arches, the central one of which is higher, and they stress the inner structure of the church.

The wallpaintings in the church are well preserved. Of thesix portraits of laymen those of Despot Deyan of Kyustendil and Despotitsa Doya are the best preserved. The church was decorated with these frescoes in their day, a little after 1354. They are real individual portraits. Doya has the fire features of a refined bolyar beauty. Many details in her costume, of an ethnographic nature, complete the realistic image of this Despotitsa, or Princess.