Georgian Wall Painting

The study of Georgian monumental painting has a decades-long path. Amidst this period it has become available to determine, discuss, and arrange the aspects of the chronology of murals, artistic style, local painting schools, etc. The abundance of the published and studied material and the major interest towards it naturally rises the idea to compile a Corpus of old Georgian monumental painting.

The project “Georgian Monumental Painting – Electronic Database” aims to gather most of the available information about the monuments of old Georgian murals and to present them fully and completely. Moreover, this project intends to make medieval Georgian frescoes accessible to local and international scholars and anyone interested in Georgian culture. This multiyear project is planned to be organised in four phases, using a chronological approach: a. 7th-11th centuries; b. 12th-13th centuries; c. 14th-15th centuries; d. 16th-18th centuries.

The first phase of the project was supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sport of Georgia as part of its grant scheme “Support to the Cultural Programmes”. The project aimed at collecting textual and visual information about the monuments of Georgian wall painting of the 7th-11th centuries into a Georgian-English electronic database and publishing it on the project website.

Academic and popular website of Georgian monumental painting is aimed not only for the specialists and students but for anyone interested in Georgian culture. It is hoped that the Electronic Database of Georgian Monumental Painting will put a foundation for the extended multivolume printed corpus of the monuments.

This project is organized and implemented by the Institute of Art History and Theory of the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University and the Centre of Georgian Art Research at the Institute.