Западноевропейская традиция изображения хамелеона в русской народной картинке = The Western-European Tradition of Depicting the Chameleon in Russian Popular Prints

This article examines the iconographical, historical, and cultural context of On the Chameleon Beast, a popular Russian print from the first half of the eighteenth century. The print reproduces an illustration from The Spectacle of Human Life (Rus. Zrelishche zhitiia chelovecheskogo) (1712), a now-lost anthology of fables from the Petrine period. The motif of the chameleon, an exotic animal which does not occur in Russia, is obviously borrowed from a foreign source; nevertheless, the interpretation of this motif is apparently an invention of the Russian artist. Unlike in non-Russian iconography, the Russian chameleon is depicted as a kind of a monster, clumsily walking upon the Earth against a postapocalyptic landscape. The numerous possible paragons of the popular print chameleon examined in the article originate from the depiction of the chameleon in Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (first published in the album Icones Animalium in 1553). Until the late seventeenth century, the illustrations in Gessner’s books had a great impact on the iconography of the chameleon, as well as of other animals. The influence can be noted in three different visual contexts: firstly, in emblems (starting with the publication of Marcus Gheeraerts’ De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Truthful Fables on Animals, 1567) and with the 1591 edition of Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata); secondly, in illustrated books on natural history (Pierre Belon, Edward Topsell, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Basilius Besler, etc.); and thirdly, in different types of printed graphic arts (from the highly artistical printings of professional academic art (Marcus Gheeraerts, Adriaen Collaert) to the popular prints of mass culture). The genetic connection of the Russian popular print chameleon with Gessner’s illustrations can be easily demonstrated by comparisons with a later, more anatomically precise tradition beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century (Claude Perrault, Antonio Tempesta, Cornelis de Bruijn, Antonio Vallisneri, Albertus Seba). In the Russian popular engraving, other images originating from Conrad Gessner’s work are the famous Cat of Kazan and a series of depictions of poultry, such as the Kalkun lubok.