Libri di Adrien Palladino

In 1901 Nikodim Pavlovic Kondakov, one of the founders of art history in Russia and a specialist in medieval art, decided to undertake a surprising expedition. Driven by a desire to see firsthand the last places where devotional images - the famous icons - were produced in the traditional way, he braved the bumpy and uncertain roads of the Russian countryside. The book you hold in your hands, published for the first time in 1901 and now available to an international audience, is in fact much more than an account of this trip. The book guides the reader through the climate of pre-revolutionary Russia, as Kondakov travels in search of local pro-duction, seeking genuinely Orthodox manifestations of an art that he saw as a direct line stretching back to the medieval past. In his very personal style, Kondakov is ultimately on a mission to save the ancient art of icons, hoping to save an art form dwindling under competition from industrial production. Today, this book is more relevant than ever, questioning the roots of Russian culture, tradition, and its feeling of exclusivity.

The city has always been, and remains, the ideal place of collective rituality. It is the city that has hosted, since Antiquity, collective celebrations of victory, important religious ceremonies, but also ritual consecrations of the elite. The aim of this book is to reflect on a specific issue: the interaction between ritual and city space. Our wish is to understand, in a multidisciplinary and cross-epochal approach, how a collective liturgy, civic or religious, can unfold within the public space and transform it. In addition to sacred buildings and seizures of power, the square and the streets become in this sense important identity-shaping loci. Bringing places of power to the street or the square means entering into a dialogue constructed between those who organise the ritual, those who perform it and those who witness it. It seems that it is in compromise between the different components of society that collective rituals can happen within the public space. Therefore, it is no surprise that the crucial question for this book is the way in which this same space is adapted to the requirements of the ritual, or, on the contrary, how the ritual adapts to the space.