Peculiarities of the Georgian façade in the middle of the 10th century (Kumurdo Cathedral)

Abstract

Urgency of the topic: Middle of the 10th century became a turning point for the Georgian architecture. This was a period when a new common system of the facade decoration was formed and conceptual and artistic merger of the nature of sculptures with decorative accents took place. Kumurdo Cathedral, which was built in 964, is one of the most enigmatic high profile architectural monuments. Based on its importance we decided to make it the main object of our investigation and use it as a basis for presentation of the findings about the major aspects of contextual and symbolic meanings of the facades and their shapes that were typical for the middle of the 10th century.

Kumurdo’s architect suggests and uses numerous symbolic formulas in the facade decorations, which in the 10th century should have been more than obvious to understand for the parish of the church. As long as we witness a certain interruption, alienation and separation from the perception of symbols, it becomes an absolute necessity for us to follow each of the images in order to understand their essence. Goal of research, its object and methods: The thesis intends to present conceptual symbolic meanings of the facade decorations in order to provide relevant understanding of old messages from our ancestors. We used a complex approach in order to demonstrate not only symbolic meaning of specific compositions of the cult constructions, but to determine ideological side of each connecting nuance of the joint system of decorations and analyze semantic concepts from the historical perspective as well.

Research topic of the PhD thesis took into consideration necessity to conduct stylistic analysis and apply comparative method and focused on the study of characteristic features of the facade decorations from different Christian countries. The work also investigated the role of the carvings and figures and their synthesis with each other. Comparative analysis of peculiarities of each regional school and development stages of Georgian facade decorations made it possible to discuss Georgian art of the Middle Ages in the global context. Special interest was paid to the research of the symbols from the early Christian period.

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