# Aleksey Lidov

Alexei Mikhailovich Lidov (Russian: Алексей́ Михай́лович Ли́дов) is a Russian art historian and byzantinist, an author of the concepts hierotopy and spatial icon, member of the Russian Academy of Arts.

## Life and career

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.

## Research

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.
Drawing upon the seminal works of A. Grabar, H.Belting, H. Maguire and Chr. Walter, Lidov developed a method of interpretational iconography, which he put into practice in his study of liturgical themes in the Byzantine art and of the symbolism of Heavenly Jerusalem. Lidov has shown that new theological ideas, formulated in the wake of the Great Schism of 1054, engendered a new kind of Byzantine church iconography with the dominant themes of Christ the Priest and the Communion of the Apostles. After his trip to the Saint Catherine's Monastery in 1996, Lidov published a book-album with the description of its unique collection of icons.
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.

## Awards and honors

* Russian Academy of Arts – corresponding member since 2007, full member since 2012
* Gold medal of the Russian Academy of Arts for the book.
* Distinguished visiting professor of the University of York, 2011
* The Medal of Merit of the Russian Academy of Arts, 2014
* The Order for Merits to Arts conferred by the Russian Academy of Arts, 2014
* The Order of Friendship of Armenia, 2016
* Christensen Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford, 2017