Font compositions by Ivan Yizhakevych in the design of works of periodicals of the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the development of fonts by Ivan Yizhakevich (1864-1962) at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th centuries. In this period of time, a prominent Kyiv artist, a graduate of the Lavra Icon Painting School and a student of the Kyiv Drawing School, Mykola Murashka 1882-1884, in 1883 was invited to participate in the project at the suggestion of the famous artist M. Vrubel and the professor of the Kyiv University of St. Volodymyr A. Prakhov restoration of the 12^th century frescoes in Kyiv's St. Cyril's Church.

            While gaining experience working with autochthonous original story paintings on biblical themes and ornamentation of the said ensemble, the artist deeply immersed himself in the study of the layer of Kyiv Russian culture, in particular handwritten fonts and braids. Until recently, only his developments were known for the periodicals of 1888-1917 (“Painting Review”, “Niva”, “World Illustration”), which were published starting from the time of his studies at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (1884-1890).

            However, it turned out that in the funds of the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine in Sofia, Kyiv, there are five files with sketches by Ivan Sidorovich, which shed light on the processes of the artist's creative search for font and ornamental compositions.

            In particular, these are cases 59, 60, 61, 64, 65 of description 1 of fund 58 – “Izhakevich I. S. – Ukrainian Soviet artist, People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR”. The most interesting of them is case 59 – “Samples of Church Slavonic fonts and ornaments”, which contains three sheets with sketches of font and ornamental compositions drawn with ink pen and graphite pencil on tracing paper (undated, made around the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries).

            In them, Ivan Yizhakevich tried to rethink the national heritage of the pre-Mongol era, the times of the greatness of the Kyivan Rus' state, and also experimented with Gothic, Renaissance and early Baroque ornamental compositions with fonts.