Символът на вярата в българската църковна живопис от XIX век (Текст и изображение)
The Creed in Bulgarian Church Painting from the 19th Century (Text and Illustration)

Summary/Abstract: The Creed belongs to a series of texts with a symbolic, moral-didactic, eschatological character or hymnographic works which are only very rarely interpreted in Church painting or which only later form their visual equivalent or cycle. At the present moment, we know of nine monuments of 19th century church painting that illustrate the 12 parts of the Creed: three wall paintings and five icons created between 1840 and 1869 or 1871. Most of them can be attributed to the Sainokov icon painters Dimi­ tar Hristov Zograph, Nikola Dospevski, Vasil pop Radojkov, and the Bansko icon painters Simeon Molerov and Mihalko Ynvanov, and Hristo Enchev from Koprivshtitsa. The thematic cycle including illustrations of the 12 parts of the Creed only appeared in the 16th century in old Russian painting. They are huge multipart icons with anywhere from three to six horizontal rows and multi-figure compositions that often unite a number of scenes or events, as well as other symbolic images. The Creed cycle can also be found in Romanian painting from the 16th century on. Two late Greek artefacts from the 18th century are also published here. The Bulgarian monuments, with the exception of the icon by Simeon Molerov, are nearly identical in terms of the composition and iconography of each of the 12 parts. The unity of some of the minute, scarcely visible details points to the use of one and the same model, which can be found in a graphic collection of the National Museum of Bulgarian Visual Art. It is a Russian engraving printed in 1827.

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