Abstract:
In the rich archives of the Georgian State Museum of Folk and Applied
Art there is a collection of photographs acquired in 1910-1913. This is
an important material for the identification and history of the precious objects
taken out of Georgia during political volatility and now kept in various
museums and private collections around the world. The present paper begins
with one of the Museum's archival photographs of a cloisonné image of the
Enthroned Virgin with Archangels in a richly-decorated chased frame. On the
mount, the work is identified as the book cover of the Khakhuli Four Gospels.
The same image of the Virgin paired with another enamel image of a
standing figure of St. Demetrius in a similarly richly-decorated chased frame
was identified by the Georgian scholars G. Chubinashvili and Sh. Amiranashvili
as the Medieval period book cover of Gelati Four Gospels. As they showed, this
book cover, one decorated with the gold-chased plaques and two cloisonné
enamels, was kept until the 1880s at the Gelati monastery near Kutaisi until the
enamels attracted collectors and antiquarians from the 19th century Russia, who,
with the support of the local authorities, robbed the treasury of the monastery.
The precious cover was removed from the manuscript and replaced by a modern
Russian cover executed in the workshop of a famous Russian jeweler I.
Sazikov. The original cover was sold to the Kamerger of the Russian Imperial
court I. Balashev. Later on, the enamels were dismantled from the cover by I.
Balashev who then lent them to different exhibitions organized between 1897-
1915 in St. Petersburg. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the enamels were
illegally taken to Berlin where they appeared on the antiquarian market and
were sold separately, St. Demetrius to the Berlin Museum and the Virgin to a
Belgian collector, A. Stoclet. The two Georgian scholars also point out that the
publications of the famous Russian scholar N. Kondakov is the only source of
information about the enamels. Kondakov considered the enamel plaque of St. Demetrius as one of the best Byzantine enamels dated by the end of the 10th and
beginning of the 11th century and the enamel of the Virgin as a work
produced in Georgia by a Georgian artist at the end of the 12th and beginning of
the 13th centuries.
Based on a critical analysis of the Georgian and Russian publications on
the enamels in a broader historical and political context as well as of the
inscriptions on the page margins, the Museum’s photo can be identified as the
book cover of the Vardzia Four Gospels, which once belonged to the Queen
Tamar (1186-1212). It was probably donated to the Vardzia monastery and its
main relic, the miraculous icon of the Virgin of Vardzia.
