THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS IN THE ART OF THE MIDDLE AGES: THE ART OF MIMICRY OR THE CHAMELEON PLOT

Images of the Resurrection of Lazarus in Christian art in Western Europe, from catacomb frescoes to miniatures of late Gothic books of hours, in most cases represent an interesting example of the refusal to construct an iconographic scheme by following the realities of the Gospel text. The plastic interpretation of the plot becomes a kind of “mimicry” and results from borrowing the entire composition or its elements from various alien subjects. In 1951, Emile Mâle stated that the iconographic scheme had been completely changed at least three times throughout the history of its formation. However, both Mâle himself and later researchers limit themselves to individual remarks on the origin of specific schemes and their parts. Taking into account that the complete or partial copying of one or more patterns within the framework of one composition is an important part of the work of a medieval master, enabling the researcher to trace the origins of visual citations that make up the iconographic scheme, in this text we attempt to consistently trace the possible origins of the main elements of iconographic schemes in the images of the Resurrection of Lazarus from III to XV centuries. Using the concepts of “citation”, “partial copying” and “moduli”, introduced into the dictionary of the art historian-medievalist R. Scheller, M. Muller and F. Deutscher, we will try to consistently present each scheme as a set of independent elements of heterogeneous origin with different “specific gravity”, united by a certain logic and associative series.