What was visual art like in 1560AD Astrakhan?

May 27, 2010 8:01 PM

What visual artistic style(s) would have been popular in the port town of Astrakhan near the year 1560? Links to sample images would be ideal.

I'm making a board game set in 1560AD Astrakhan and I'd like to infuse it with visual flavor accurate for that time and place.

I've googled about, and found sample images from areas that were somewhat nearby in time and space (plus or minus 100 years, within 1000 miles), but those images have wildly differing styles, and I'm having a hard time reconciling them into something coherent for the game.

Are there any representative images of art from that time and place available online? If not, where could I find them?

posted by a snickering nuthatch to Media & Arts (2 answers total)

Best answer: I think that your conclusion is correct that art there at that time would have had wildly differing styles, given its location on trade routes and the conquests and upheavals and population shifts that occurred during the preceding two centuries. I note that Tamerlane conquered it about 150 years before the time period you're looking at and as I understand it his m.o. was usually to take all of the artisans in the cities he conquered and ship them off to his capital Samarkand; local art may not have recovered much by 1560.

One thing that might have been present are Russian icons among the Russians there and possibly in the possession of any people who Russian Orthodox missionaries had evangelized to. (Many sample images at Wikimedia Commons via the Wikipedia page.)

A very interesting group in that region was the Khazars, who decided as a nation to adopt Judaism near the end of the first millennium, I think. But they had mostly disappeared several centuries before 1560 and we haven't found enough about them archaeologically to know what their art would have looked like.
posted by XMLicious at 10:52 PM on May 27, 2010

Response by poster: Since no one has chimed in with a more conclusive answer, you're probably right. Thanks for the input!
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:28 PM on June 27, 2010