Abstract

This article examines source-critical methods for the study of corpora of visual sources. It draws on the author's work in preparing and teaching the lecture course "Source Studies of Visual Sources," required of all students specializing in source studies in the Faculty of History (Lomonosov Moscow State University). The general framework for the source criticism of visual materials was proposed by Academician I.D. Koval'chenko. The specific form in which these sources encode information about historical reality necessitates their systematic decoding by the historian and, as a rule, the use of evidence from other types of sources. For the first time, this article sets out to demonstrate the particular problems involved in studying several groups of carriers of visual information created for different purposes and at different times. In the examples selected by the author, the image — as the defining characteristic of these sources — is analyzed in the context of additional data concerning the object of study provided by written materials. Works of Old Russian painting — miniatures in illuminated chronicle compilations — served as illustrations to specific textual passages; recourse to these texts is essential for grasping the visual image. In the Russian Empire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the Table of Ranks helps to identify persons on the portraits. A canvas on which an event has been recorded by the brush of an eyewitness painter preserves a visual testimony to the historical fact and at the same time reflects the author's own view of the subject depicted. Caricature, as a work of satirical graphic art, represents a prompt journalistic response to an event perceived as significant by contemporaries. A specific feature of this kind of source is the combination of drawing and text: the text may complement the image, explain it, clash with it, or come into resonance with it. The invention of photography, and later of cinema, made it possible to produce sources in which the image was recorded by a technical device. By directing the lens of the camera at the subject, the photographer defined the limits of the frame. A motion picture represents an event not only visibly and figuratively but also in motion close to that of real life.