New Kingdom era in ancient Egypt is associated with the prosperity of the state and active foreign policy, expressed in numerous actions and major military campaigns. Officials as a reward for good service, as well as soldiers for personal courage and bravery in battle, received special distinction insignia. The article investigates the different types of ancient Egyptian awards and their classification. Comprehensive analysis of the material, depictive and written sources used in this article allows to formulate typology of the ancient Egyptian New Kingdom era awards.

The paper tries to analyse and reconstruct the iconography of the female procession scene in the painting ensemble of the so called “Chapel of the Exodus” (Early Christian mausoleum from Al-Bagawat necropolis in the Egyptian oasis of Kharga, IV AD). The features of the image allow to match it to a big range of Early Christian procession scenes, with similar iconography, but from the other epochs and regions. This comparison allows to suggest the common source of this type of iconography.

The article traces the history of interest of art researchers to preverbal communicative kinesics function, its connection to the collective unconscious and cultural archetype. The author shows how directly or indirectly, art historians and psychologists of the end of the XIX and XX centuries came to an idea of fundamental connection of the collective unconscious and cultural archetype to traditions of stylistic development, and image-bearing evolution of the spatial arts. The article outlines the main ways of interpreting kinesics and visual topos in the theoretical and methodological conceptions of the art studies in the end of XIX and of the XX centuries.

The article introduces the results of the studies carried out by the RSUH Department of Museology aimed to unveil previously unknown autportraits of Benvenuto Cellini. Biometric parametres comparison of the discovered portraits allows to draw conclusions on stylistic distinctions of self-portraits and on some characteristic individualities of Benvenuto Cellini’s look.

The article deals with the issue of letter graphics in Russian futurism. Futurist poetry articulates a specific kind of vision which combines visual and verbal representation, thus setting a new type of interrelations between graphics and the poetic text. The poets of the Zaum created a new graphic alphabet which expresses the synthesis of the verbal and visual through the integrative nature of the isoverbal text. A new typography appeared in the works of Ilia Zdanevich, Igor Terentiev and Aleksei Kruchenykh. Being a phenomenon of transformation of iconic signs, Varvara Stepanova’s visual poetry comprised an experiment which was both phonetic and graphical. The new model of representation received a remarkable structural solution when an abstract composition with coloured letters traced an unconventional reference between the verbal and visual contexts.

The question of the relevance of the avant-garde is close to the problem of formation of aesthetic discourse adequate to the context of contemporary Russian and Western art. The article highlighted the conceptual and historical understanding of the avant-garde, as making theoretical basis to mark and define the boundaries and intentions of contemporary art. The concept of the avant-garde works today in the framework of ready-made, similar to described by Thierry de Duve: if ready-made “as an art” allows to include in the field of modern art all everyday facts, the ready-made “as an avant-guard” creates a situation of aesthetic events beyond art, reconceptualizing the history of art and changing the vectors direction.

In the history of furniture collecting in Russia two main types of collections, formed from the XVI century to the 1930s can be distinguished. The earliest type is proto-Museum of XVI century, intended only to combine items in the historical-memorial frame, what is typical for museums and private collections of historical objects and what traces as a partial of any collection of any type. The formation of the second type comes back to the middle of the XVIII century, and pertains to collecting art furniture according to art qualities. Objects are interpreted as art achievements, what is typical in private collecting and official Museum collections.

The article is on the typology of vehicles used in Russian court masquerades of the XVIII century. Based on archival materials and examples of decorative art in Museum collections, the author identifies and analyses peculiarities of usage, design and decor of different groups of masquerade carriages. The article addresses the issue of relations between European culture influences and national traditions in design of the costumed performances and entertainments.

The article is an attempt to analyse peculiarities of architectural compositions and space image specifics in the wallpaintings of the Church of the Virgin Pantanassa in Mistra in the context of Byzantine painting as well as their prototype search in Hellenistic and Western traditions. In the course of the analyzing the author features sources of Byzantine tradition of space imaging and its key difference from Hellenistic and Western ones. The article also considers probable semantics of the architectural images in the Late Paleologan paintings, what is taken as a basic for a new approach to conceptualization of Pantanassa wallpaintings in cultural and intellectual contexts of the Late Paleologan art.

The article is devoted to substantiation of presence at the animation different from the cinema ontology applied to the description and construction of theoretical model of ontology of the “matrix container” used by animation, conceptually and terminologically correlated to theoretical model of “the matrix container” used by cinema, through their comparison.

In between modernism and postmodernism Yves Klein hovered over the verge of mysticism and mystification, abstraction and corporeity, paint, fire and air. Registered paint formula, patent for remote artworks creation, immaterial paintings, checks for the void transfer, architecture from air, flight from the window - here is an incomplete list of inventions that allowed Klein to gain the reputation of an ingenious magician in white gloves. However these inventions gave reason for some researchers as Thierry de Duve to invalidly blame Klein for falsification of his achievements: assimilation of artistic value to price, excogitation of non-existent works and self-mystification to the point of credulity. This article attempts to contest the accusations of the critic and to prove the legitimacy of the mystifying devices used by Klein both in the context of transition period between modernism and post-modernism, and as an avant-guard strategy.

The article is devoted to the mosaic decoration in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, executed on order of Niphon I, the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1310-1314. Iconographic and stylistic features of the mosaics are considered as mainly issue of the origin of craftspeople. Some iconographic features, traced back to the Constantinopolitan artistic tradition are analysed. Particular attention is paid to the stylistic particularities that make the character of mosaics in the Church of the Holy Apostles different from those in the metropolitan monumental ensembles of the first quarter of the XIV century (Kariye Camii and Fethiye Camii).