The Missing Pages by Watenpaugh Heghnar Zeitlian;

Author:Watenpaugh, Heghnar Zeitlian; [Watenpaugh, Heghnar Zeitlian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

YEREVAN

Toros Roslin, Artist of the Armenian Nation

• AN APARTMENT IN YEREVAN. ARMENIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. 1984.

A charcoal dawn was rising as Razmik Davoyan sat at his writing desk. He battled the same daunting task every day: to take his anger, his defiance, and his hopes and to tame them into literary form—a form that the censor would approve for publication.

He was a poet. He owed it to himself to tell the truth, about the anguish he felt and the anguish he saw etched on the faces of those close to him. About the weight that ground him down, that had crushed even the bravest. “They,” the comrades, were always watching. They could make you disappear. They could pound you into silence or into drab conformity, to the point where you would willingly mute your own voice and write suitable verse about farmers harvesting turnips.

He was a poet, but he would turn to storytelling now. He would take the life of the greatest Armenian artist, pull it from the dust of centuries and the antiseptic, state-sponsored confines of the museum, and with it he would tell his own story, of a poet and his people and their land. He would grasp the past, rewrite the present, and conjure a future. He turned a fresh page in his notebook and wrote the title, “Toros Roslin.”

. . .

Toros Roslin’s place in art history and in Armenian identity underwent a sea change in the twentieth century. An obscure signature in a few medieval colophons became Armenian art’s most recognized name. Scholars, collectors, and museums revered him as a master illuminator. Beyond the circle of specialists, popular artists and writers drew inspiration from Roslin. The Armenian public saw him as a source of pride and an icon of national identity.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, those who came into contact with the Zeytun Gospels knew nothing about its illuminator. They considered the manuscript sacred and beautiful, but it was its patron, Catholicos Constantine, that enhanced its value with his historical prominence. In the 1930s, when Dr. Der Ghazarian wrote about the manuscript, he recalled its patron and not its illuminator.1 By contrast, thirty years later, aware of Roslin’s growing reputation as one of the great medieval artists, Der Ghazarian recognized that the glittering book he had once held in Marash had been “the masterpiece of the miniaturist Toros Roslin.”2

It is through the colophons he wrote that Roslin transmitted his name to his modern viewers. Medieval Armenian objects retained the memory of their makers and could reveal them when activated. Armenian manuscripts characteristically featured colophons that constituted “repositories of memory,” the literal meaning of their Armenian name, hishadagaran. The original scribe wrote the first colophon, but subsequent owners or even readers appended notes that sometimes amounted to short historical chronicles. Thus a Gospels manuscript could double as a historical document. True, many notations written long after the fall of the Cilician Kingdom are brief, in vernaculars difficult to parse, and describe local events lost in the fog of history.

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