Темата за Богородица – традиции и западни влияния в няколко от рисунките от архива „Захарий Зограф”
The Theme of Theotokos – Traditions and Western Influences in Some Drawings from the Zahari Zograf Archive

Summary/Abstract: During the last decades researches have come to the conclusion and notion that the archive carrying the name of Zahari Zograf which is preserved in the National Art Gallery, belonged generally speaking to the whole Dospevski family and the forefather of which – Hristo Dimitrov was the founder of the Samokov School of painting. The archive is exceptionally rich and varied and contains different type and genre paintings, etudes, graphic sheets, wholly preserved albums with engravings, etc. Most of the paintings could certainly be attributed to Zahari Zograf while the greater part of the other archive materials could have possibly been bought by him and belonged to two great French artists that have passed through Plovdiv and who gave drawing lessons in 1841. The drawings and etudes are greatly varied thematically and could possibly be grouped according to the themes, such as for example the Apocalypses. In this text I have selected randomly just a few of them that have caught my attention with their specific theme and iconography. I have not examined them in a context or together with others from the archive of Zahari Zograf that are thematically close to them. With this selection I wanted also to show the different ways of using a model – directly or with introduced details and interpretations made by the icon painters themselves. These drawings are: St Mary on a throne with the prophets and Old Testament versions of her, carried by flying angels, ‘A Woman, Dressed in Sun’ , ‘St Mary as a Queen’, St Mary Grieving’, ‘An- nunciation Mary’.

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