The image of Ivan the Terrible attracted the attention of many researchers. However, the sources tell about him, first of all, as about an outstanding personality who left a significant mark in the history of the Russian state. About how outwardly Ivan IV was, there are very scanty testimonies of the contemporaries of the Russian sovereign.
Instructions
Step 1
According to the memories of people who knew Grozny, which remained in history, the Russian ruler was blue-eyed and had a penetrating look. The ambassador from Germany, Daniel Prinz, who saw the tsar twice, noted that Ivan the Terrible's constantly shifting eyes were carefully watching everything around. Ivan Vasilyevich was reddish, had a long, thick beard, large mustache, and his head, according to the customs of those days, was shaved. By the middle of the reign, the face of the sovereign took on a gloom and gloom. Ivan the Terrible was well built, tall and strong. Marco Foscarino, the ambassador from Venice, seeing the twenty-seven-year-old Russian autocrat, wrote: "He is handsome."
Step 2
In the Middle Ages, it was forbidden to paint portraits of sovereigns during his lifetime. The appearance of the rulers could be captured on icons, and only in cases of their canonization. Some scientists consider the image on a silver penny found by archaeologists to be a lifetime portrait of Ivan the Terrible. Ancient chronicles testify that by order of the Great Prince Ivan Vasilyevich, the Prince was minted on the coins of the Middle Ages on horseback with a spear in his hand.
Step 3
The opportunity to better imagine the appearance of the Moscow Tsar presented itself in the second half of the twentieth century, when the famous scientist and sculptor M. M. Gerasimov, using a unique technique, was able to restore and reflect in sculpture the portrait of Ivan the Terrible. According to the anthropologist, the king was a large man who grew stout at the end of his life, about 180 centimeters in height. His appearance tends to the West Slavic type, which, perhaps, inherited from his mother Elena Glinskaya. The inherited features of the appearance from the side of the grandmother, the Greek woman Sophia Paleologue, is a thin nose, with high rounded eye orbits. The portrait of the formidable ruler, presented by the scientist, was reconstructed according to specific features of the skull, therefore M. Gerasimov limits his research to facial features: a disgusting grimace on tightly compressed lips, watchful gloomy eyes. When creating the bust, the sculptor turned to the portrait of Grozny, painted by the artist of the 16th century and long exported from Russia, kept in Copenhagen, as well as to written documentary sources.
Step 4
In the Middle Ages, artists depicted personalities on parsuns (translated from Latin as “persona”), which differed little from icons. Parsuna, which depicts Ivan the Terrible in an icon-painting manner, is kept in the Royal Museum of Copenhagen. It was this that the anthropologist and author of the bust M. Gerasimov used, recreating the hair, beard and mustache in the sculptural image of the Russian tsar.
Step 5
The canvases of famous painters help to represent the appearance of Ivan IV. But the artists primarily strove to convey in appearance the character of the formidable tsar. For example, in the portrait painted by V. Vasnetsov, a strong contradictory personality appears, captured in history and folk poetic legends. Film directors also evaluate the image of Ivan the Terrible and his place in Russian history in their own way.
