Visual Ambiguity in Early Modern Muscovy: Ruler and the Ruled in Context

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The image of a ruler immediately presumes an iconography that establishes a likeness for purposes of identification and authority. Specific details can introduce connotations of character, emotion, power, and legitimacy layered onto the basic denotation. The contextual setting, spatial or temporal, also plays a role in guiding interpretation towards a specific end, although understanding it might very well depend on the acuity of the beholder. These same contingencies hold for images of the ruled themselves as well as their associated signifiers.
This panel looks to Early Modern Muscovy to assess visual ambiguity introduced by external and internal sources: foreign artists creating novel representations of a Muscovite ruler for a European audience; a Muscovite state artist depicting a living tsar in an enigmatic, richly inscribed, spiritual setting; and indigenous peoples of the Siberian Far North insinuating signs of their visual self-representation into the sovereign’s bureaucratic system.

Sub Unit

• Early Slavic Studies

Chair

• Marisa Karyl Franz, New York U

Papers

• Picturing Sovereignty: Ambiguity in European Portraits of Russian Rulers - Nancy S. Kollmann, Stanford U

• Drawing Conclusions: Presence and Absence in Ushakov’s Tree - Michael S. Flier, Harvard U

• Pictures from the Arctic: The Colonized Draw Back - Valerie Ann Kivelson, U of Michigan

Discussant

• Daniel B. Rowland, U of Kentucky