The new book by Tetiana Kara-Vasylieva, Masterpieces of Church Needlework in Ukraine (Twelfth to Twentieth Centuries) introduces readers to one of the most interesting and yet little known areas of Ukrainian culture, church embroidery. Tightly linked with icon and fresco painting and later with engraving, the art of needlework was to some extent a continuation of such arts in another material and genre.
The author gives a penetrating overview of the development of church embroidery in Ukraine, ranging from the portrait of the Oranta Mother of God from Kyiv’s Sophia Church made in the thirteenth century to the shroud of Christ embroidered by O. Prakhova for the Volodymyr Cathedral in Kyiv in early twentieth century and based on the drawing by M. Vasnetsov. These samples of church needlework graphically demonstrate the continuity of this religious genre. The bulk of embroidery which has been preserved to our day, however, was done in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and there is nothing strange about it, because this period was the heyday of the church needlework, becoming a separate genre in Ukrainian culture and revealing basic features of its national originality.
Church embroidery began to thrive in Ukrainian convents, renowned as centers of culture and education. At the cusp of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Kyiv Ascension Pechersk Convent headed by Mother Superior Mary Magdalene Mazepa and her relatives, the Mokiyevsky family, became widely acclaimed as a center of church needlework. The author gives a review of the signed works done by the Mazepa family portraying the donors, the Mother Superior, and the renowned hetman himself. The book also gives much space to the Chernihiv Pyatnytsky and Kyiv Florivsky nunneries whose sisters brought the baroque to embroidery. Unlike other genres of medieval art, the authors of embroidered canvasses and the life stories of the nuns who sewed (and even painted icons) can be established by referring to convent archives. Represented for the first time in the book, they throw much light on the role played by women in the development of Ukraine’s culture and education in the early modern period.
Tracing the evolution of embroidery styles from the post-Byzantine to the Renaissance, baroque, rococo, and modern, the author emphasizes the decisive impact of the baroque which manifested itself in the creation of the art’s most distinguished masterpieces with vivid local interpretations reflecting the Ukrainian national character. The innovations inspired by the baroque reveal the innermost attributes of Ukrainian culture and impacted on the further development of folk and professional art.
Thus, Ukrainian embroidery was able to develop within the general context of Ukrainian art, primarily, of frescoes, icon painting, later engraving, and some kinds of ornamental art, as well as literature, education, religious, and esthetic theories, and the specifics of the Ukrainian mentality.
Published by the information and publishing center of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with the blessing from Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and all Ukraine, this well designed book is both an ecclesiastical and secular publication. Being highly successful, the book indicates the need for more such creative endeavors to research and popularize Ukraine’s cultural heritage.
