Aleksey Lidov

Later Lidov turned to the study of miracle-working icons and Christian relics, which was quite a new subject in art history. In 2000 he initiated a program of research and cultural activities “Christian relics”, which included, in particular, two exhibitions and an international conference. During this period Lidov wrote several papers on the Hodegetria of Constantinople and the Holy Mandylion. While studying the role of miraculous icons and relics in the formation of sacred spaces in the Eastern Christian tradition, Lidov has formulated a new concept of hierotopy. The term hierotopy has two meanings. It is the creation of sacred spaces as a special form of human creativity and also a related academic field, which spans art history, archaeology, anthropology, and religious studies. Hierotopy accounts not only for artistic images and the symbolic world they form, but also for the entire collection of various media that serve to organize a sacred space into a spatial icon. The perception of sacred spaces has been analyzed by Lidov in terms of image-paradigms, which reflect the experience of a sacred space in its wholeness and are distinct from any illustrative pictures.

During his studies at the University of Moscow Lidov specialized in the Byzantine art history. While working as a researcher at the State Museum of Oriental Art, he studied the Christian art of Armenia and Georgia. Building upon the material of his PhD thesis, he published in 1991 his first book about the mural paintings of the Akhtala monastery in Armenia. In this book he characterized the art of chalcedonian Armenians as a separate iconographic tradition, which combined Byzantine, Georgian and Armenian elements.

Lidov was born in Moscow on March 9, 1959. His father, Mikhail Lidov, was a Russian space scientist; his mother, Diana – a mathematician. Upon the graduation from the department of art history of the Moscow State University in 1981, his first appointment was at the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow. He earned a PhD in art history from the Moscow State University in 1989. In 1991 he founded the Research Center for the Eastern Christian Culture, an independent non-governmental organization, and has worked as its director. In 2008—2009 he served as the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Art. Since 2010 he works at the Institute of World Culture at the Moscow State University as director of the Department of Ancient Culture. Lidov has lectured at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne universities et al. He initiated several research programs and organized nine international symposia on iconographical and hierotopical subjects.