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Museums are not only cultural venues; they also intend to reinforce the identity and image of the communities. This paper examines how the identifying role of the museum ‒ in this case the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa ‒ has influenced the writing of the explanatory information to The Red Maple (1914), an oil painting by A. Y. Jackson. This explanatory note, whose presence is significant, emphasize the nationalist aspects of the picture, made by a founding member of the future Group of Seven at the beginning of World War I. However, this interpretation seems exaggerated. Even if the Group of Seven was intending to found a distinct Canadian art group and it is admitted that World War I marked for Canada an important phase of emancipation, nevertheless, there is no evidence that Jackson was at that time concerned by the war. Nor does he seem to have been in any way sensitive to the political dimension of Canadian participation in the conflict. It is most likely that the writing of the note has been influenced by the paper given to the Museum as a whole, i.e. a nationalist one, and attributed to the work an overestimated symbolic aspect. This shows how important it is that the discourse on art, when conveyed by a museum, strives to avoid as many intuitive elements as possible in order to concentrate on the work itself.

The album of drawings of an artist can be compared with a diary where personal thoughts and observations are fixed in a visual language. The artist transfigures the empirical experience on paper creating a subjective space and his own artistic universe. In order to perceive this imaginary spacein a more pronounced way, it is important to relate it to the physical space where the artist lives and works. The author has chosen three artists, Leonid Grigorasenco, Emil Childescu and Ion Serbinov for research, who belong to different generations, but have a classical, figurative vision and reflected, in their drawings, on the genius loci of the city Chisinau. In his drawings, L. Grigorasenco fixes architectural objects and details, picturesque and visible places of Chisinau of the 1960s. He builds the shape with the colored pencil, whose hatches stretch with transparent color shades that merge or overlap on the color of the paper. Unlike L. Grigorasenco, E. Childescu seems to be in a hurry and does not stop to analyze, so contemplatively, the form or the texture. He creates a graphic compositional structure and this structure is already subordinated to the state and atmosphere of the drawing. Ion Serbinov defines the finality of his works intuitively; it is reached when the artist decides that he expressed the state of nature concerned to the personal impression and leaves space for the viewer’s interpretations. This artistic method gives the seemingly unfinished works an aspect of lightness, representing an instant dialogue with Chisinau’s ambiance.

The paper provides data on the almost fifty-year-long participation of artists from the Romanian cultural region in the BIB exhibitions, one of the world’s most prestigious. The issue has not been studied earlier because of the lack of scholarly interest in children’s book illustration. The paper examines artworks executed by professional artists from the left bank of the Prut or the Prut-Nistru area (the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic / the Republic of Moldova) and the right bank of the Prut (the Romanian Socialist Republic / the Republic of Romania). Both regions are considered since they have a common literary folk heritage. In the paper, the illustrations are examined both in terms of the evolution of national traditions in illustrating children’s literature, and in terms of the impact of European art. Since the very beginning, the participation of artists has been conditioned by the publication of illustrations. Thus, any illustration presented at the BIB could be examined as an individual artwork, and also as a piece of book design. The organizers of the contest have been guided by the provisions of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), the Universal Copyright Convention (1952) and also the statements of the International Board on Books for Young (founded 1953) concerning support in publishing and distributing books for children around the world.

The paper aims to sum up the most relevant publications on the art of metals from Bessarabia in the context of the evolution of artistic metal processing in Europe. The problem of metal art development has been reflected in scientific papers of different character. The multitude of topics allowed outlining the historiography on guilds and craft workshops, the activity of artists and the most representative works of goldsmiths and hardware artistic objects. It was found that at the current stage of research, despite the presence of a series of recent publications, the objects of precious and common metals from Bessarabia did not benefit from an interdisciplinary study that would give a comprehensive answer to the historical, artistic and technological investigation. We conclude that the issue of metal art evolution was addressed unequally in historiography. The diversity of publications focusing on different topics, which provided necessary documentary support, serves as proof.

The phenomenon of time is a key link in the design of an ethnic artistic tradition. Meanwhile, this phenomenon has been studied insufficiently by ethnologists and art critics. The scientific novelty of the work is the author`s vision of nature and the role of the phenomenon of time by analyzing such manifestations as time-beginning, time of active practices, time-context of ethno-artistic tradition. The tradition of Ukrainian folk clothes beaded decor is the core of the research. The author compares her main conclusions with the realities of other ethnic folk artistic traditions, such as painted Easter eggs, glass painting, cutouts (ornament, cut out on paper). The author demonstrates that all processes occurring in the system of ethnic tradition are directly related to the passionarity of the ethnos. It is precisely the high level of passionarity that provides a high level of tradition passion-creative potential and promotes the emergence of such phenomena as time-beginning and time of active practices. The qualitative features of the ethno-artistic tradition time-context depend on the level of passion-creative potential. The author sees the perspective in studying other phenomena, which are also important for the construction of a paradigm of ethno-artistic tradition, in particular: the hearth of art, the master (as the main bearer of the tradition) and the artwork.

The national cultural heritage plays an essential role in preserving the national identity and regional specificity, as well as in defining the democratic principles in a Europe of cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. Art goods are one of the greatest temptations in committing crimes. Preparing the complete evidence requires multidisciplinary involvement. In Romania, Law 182/2000 on the protection of the mobile national cultural heritage establishes the legal regime on the mobile national cultural heritage and regulates the specific activities to protect them. Of the crimes against cultural heritage most frequently encountered are the theft of works of art, smuggling and counterfeiting. These included homes (private collections), places of worship; museums and archaeological sites. The paper presents the methodology for the realization of a judicial expertise in case of art objects in a criminal or civil case. The legal and scientific aspects are presented. The expert plays an essential role in authenticating an art object. When asked by the judge for judicial expertise, the art expert must answer specific questions about the subject’s belonging, the nature of the composite materials and the way in which it is put into operation. To accomplish this, the object is analyzed by using specific techniques, corresponding to the nature of the incriminated object. A case study on the offense of forgery is presented.

The present paper discusses the emergence and evolution of the popular theater performances as ethno-social phenomena for the affirmation of the traditional culture, preserved and promoted in the contemporary world. We find that in the antiquity the practice of folk customs with the implication of ritual masking was motivated by the need of individuals to be transported and disguised with the help of masks in order to induce, on the one hand, the spiritual connection with the divine creatures, with the ancestors of the kin, with the totemic characters of the locality, and on the other hand, pursued the apotropaic prospect of obtaining, by hiding in mythical characters, the real or magical protection against the evil actions of demons, deities or supernatural malignant forces that, in the vision of the people, persecute and counteract human existence. The actor wearing the mask during the primitive era was marked by its sacred value, through which transcendence was made in time and profane space. With the passing of the years, substantial changes occur in the collective mentality of the people, clauses that motivated the gradual evolution of magical transfiguration into the playful one, attested in family and calendar habits, resulting in the desacralisation of the ritual mask.

In the present study, based on edited papers, some aspects of the genesis problem have been investigated, the evolution and the spreading of some monastic villages in the Iasi region. Thus, we have found that most of the monastery localities are lordly or boyar, less often individual property. The monastic villages were spread on both sides of the Prut River and its tributaries on the right and on the left. Monastic property, had to some extent a compact character. This was dictated by the need for efficient administration. The economy of the monastery villages, as well as other categories of villages, based on the natural household. Thus, the monastery villages were structured in the following way: the hearth of the village, tilled land, the field, grazing ground, the forest, lake, place for apiary, apiary, the mill etc. The work of the inhabitants of a monastery village was organized and watched by the representative of the monastery in the local administration. Disputes over some issues related to the breaking the boundaries of the monastery property, as well as the status of the monastery neighbors, could only be resolved with the involvement of the lord of the Country of Moldova.

The article presents Heinrich von Wlislocki – a folklorist, literary historian, linguist and educator, wide ly known in the scientific circles of Europe of the late XIX century, as one of the first XIX century European researcher of the gypsies – in the memories of his contemporaries. He was a Doctor of Philosophy, one of those whom his colleagues called a “friend of the Gypsies”, he went to wander with the camp of Transylvanian gypsies to collect field material directly in their midst. As a result, about 80 papers were published in selected publications, as well as in well-known scientific journals in Europe. Most often, his publications could be seen in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, of which he was a member. Being a contemporary of George Henry Borrow (1803–1881), Alexander Gheorghe Paspati (1814–1891), Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), Francis Hindes Grum (1851–1902), Anton Herrmann (1851–1926), Hans Ferdinand Helmolt (1865–1929), Heinrich von Wlislocki (1856–1907) was one of the few folklorists and connoisseurs of Gypsy life and culture of the XIX century. The latter completely immersed themselves in the life of the Gypsy, mastering for the first time the ethnographic method of included observation. It was a heroic period of studying folklore in Europe, when dedicated scientists created a folkloric field of research from the scratch. 110 years passed since the death of Heinrich von Wlislocki but this did not erase his name from the historical memory, folklorist researchers still refer to his works, including them in scientific circulation.

The author of the present paper has determined the basic premises and vectors of evolution of the International Festival Days of New Music from the Republic of Moldova, founded on the initiative of composer Ghenadie Ciobanu in 1991. The author analyses the context of apparition of the Festival, being in between the postcomunist transition of the East, and the infuence of the postmodern tendencies of the West. Through the permanent contribution, of XXV editions, the Festival manifest itself as a unique factor of consolidation of the cultural sector of contemporary music, being the only opportunity of invasion of new music on the public scenes of National Philarmonic Hall, Organ Hall, the Hall of Public Company „Teleradio-Moldova”, the Hall of Union of Composers. Analyzing peculiarities of cultural and artistic processes in the Republic of Moldova, the author underlines the issue of cultural synchronization and integration in the context of universal musical culture.

The third part of the study The problem of text and image... is devoted to the typological classification of the inscriptions in the Romanian medieval art. Specialists in paleography observed non-compliance – extremely common – dating between actual painting of icons and the inscriptions dating from the same icons. One of the reasons for failure of traditional palaeographical methods in the research of epigraphic texts is related to the ineffectiveness of nomenclature types of characters taken from writing on parchment or paper and applied to hard materials such as wood, stone or metal. The difficulties, mentioned above, in the second half of the Twentieth century have pushed forward taxonomic investigations of medieval inscriptions. The methodological principles of epigraphical classification have been substantially clarified and finalized. Inscriptions on Orthodox icons and mural paintings were grouped according to various criteria: material and technical execution, location, language, content, form, time and so on. Thus, it was built the general typology of the texts and the inscriptions of the Ancient Orthodox Art. A second issue mentioned in the study is referring to morphological and grammatical structure of the names (theonyms, hagionyms, anthroponyms, names of places, eortonyms, ekklesionyms, icononyms) present in medieval icons and mural painting. The end of the study is addressed to issue of hierotopy’s genesis – seen in close connection with the acting-pragmatic aspect of the relationship between the work of Christian art and its users.

The paper presents the results of the in situ conservation of the metal and leather artifacts discovered at the Capriana monastery. On August 25, 2016, metropolitan Vladimir, together with members of the BOM Synod, in the presence of a delegation of experts from Romania and Moldova, carried out the exhumation of the body of Metropolitan Gavriil Bănulescu-Bodoni from the crypt of the Church of the "Assumption" . At the initiative of the Ministry of Culture and with the care of Deputy Minister Gheorghe Postica, particular attention was paid to the artifacts that were part of the Metropolitan's clothing. At the time of discovering the crypt, the artifacts were extracted according to the methodological norms together with part of the corresponding soil. It ensures the keeping of a microclimate close to that in which they stay for a short period of time before pre-treatment treatments. The influence of the factors: temperature, air, light, humidity on the artifacts when passing from the anaerobic environment into the aerobic environment is presented. The leather as a perishable organic material required biological conservation treatment in situ after land removal. The leather artifacts consist of a boot sole, skin fragments – upper, skin and ankle fragments, skin fragments. The metallic artifacts are: pectoral cross, hand cross, textile accessories, coffin accessories, miter accessories. Metallic and collagen artefacts are currently undergoing complex, interdisciplinary research, to achieve the full scientific exploitation of the results obtained.

The article discusses the fortified church in the village of Sutkivtsi, Podillia historic region, a unique monument of architecture that belongs to the quatrefoil-shaped buildings. Based on the data of architectural and archaeological research, the author offers some considerable corrections in the constructional history of the building discussed; in particular, the initial, previously unknown period of the building’s existence in the XIII–XIV century is being specified. As to the reconstruction as of the XV century, it relates to redevelopment of the building for making it a part of a mighty, two-component military fortification in the village of Sutkivtsi to consist of a quatrefoil and a proto-bastion castle. The list of similar buildings, offered in the paper, includes the donjon in Étampes, Ile de France. The author also raises the issue of how the idea of a reverse incastellation can be considered, i.e. the one of reconstruction of towers in a way that they become included in the sacral buildings.

The paper considers the issue of authorship of Catholic church in Kishinev, which was built in 1838–1840. The author proves that brothers Josef and Louis Charlemagne contributed intimately to its building. She thinks that Catholic church in Kishinev was built by model project developed with the direct involvement of brothers Charlemagne. The hypothesis could be validated by a comparison between the model project developed by The Commission of projects and budget of Architectural Committee of The Department of State Economy and Public Buildings in Sankt-Petersburg, and the project of Catholic Church in Kishinev, which was approved by The Commission of The Department of Roads and Public Buildings in the same city on 18 of July, 1838. The careful consideration of the model project led us to conclude that that it is a close analogy to Kishinev’s temple. The identity of these two projects confirms our suggestion about the origin of Kishinev Catholic Church’s image. However, this conclusion does not belittle the architectural value of the temple. The Catholic Church presents a bright example of pure classic architectural tradition which kept on to be a very important part of Kishinev’s architectural style. That’s why the Catholic Church of Kishinev is an architectural monument of the national interest of the Republic of Moldova.

The present paper describes an archaeozoological assemblage from Late Eneolithic settlement of Gordineşti II-Stînca goală. The studied osteological material is characterized by low number of remains of wild animals, the predominant position of cattle and small cattle (with apparent importance of Capra hircus among small cattle), sparce remains of horse and apparent absence of pig in this sample. Systematical structure of the archaeozoological material from Gordineșşti II-Stînca goală and specific post-mortem modifications of bone remains are similar to the animal remains complexes from the described earlier sites of the Cucuteni-Tripolie Culture Horodca X and Trinca-La Șanț.

In this paper we propose a report of the archaeozoological researches from the post-war period, during the 50s-90s of the last century in particular, focusing on the results obtained regarding the estimation of the food resources of animal origin used in Medieval Moldova. We propose an overview of the contributions of the researchers V.I. Tsalkin, A. David, S. Haimovici etc., the research methods used in the study of faunal materials on both sides of the Prut, the limitations of approaching the problem of meat resources in the East Carpathian space and the new directions of archaeological research approached in the last two decades.

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the flint industry and functional products of phase B/I Trypillyan settlements in the Middle Dniester region. The results are compared to the flint production of previous period of Trypillya A/II-A/III of the same region. The difference between the techniques of two consecutive periods is characterized by the increased width of blade blanks and complete rejection of the microlith points/microburin technique. The technique of biface manufacture (triangular arrow- head) used on flake blanks instead. Two types of inset to sickles that replaced one type inset of early Trypillya are distinguished. These features can be identified as the transition signs to the Trypillya B/I period (for the Middle Dniester region). Considering the significant difference between the two technologies of consecutive period of culture (early and the beginning of the middle) the question of the new techniques origin is raised. For the purpose of this problem the materials of neighboring cultures are used. As a result of the close contacts at the appointed time, between Trypillya-Cucuteni culture and Gumelnita-Karanovo VI- Varna and Bolgrad-Alden cultures, adopting of the new techniques is seen not from the steppe cultures (contacts with which were unimportant), but from cultures of the Balkan-Danube-region.

The article presents the archaeological researches carried out at Trinca “Izvorul lui Luca” settlement in 1984. The paper is part of the series of articles initiated by the authors in order to include the research results of this unusual site. The discovered archaeological remains were treated in a complex way, presented on layers, complexes, categories and types. Thus, the discovered complexes were described, the pieces of inventory systematized according to the categories of materials from which they were made, while the ceramics is presented by categories, types and variants. The most relevant findings have been analysed in more detail, being related to those specific of other synchronous or partially synchronic neighbouring cultures. As a result, the existence of a set of artefacts has been established, having analogies in the Hallstattian Carpathian-Nistrian cultural environment and, respectively, in the Middle Danube area.

The paper presents a description and analysis of the archaeozoological material from medieval monuments of Saltov Culture (Kharkiv region, Ukraine) in a wide geographical, climatic, cultural, historical, and archaeological context. The proposed statistical, biometric, and demographic analysis of the archaeozoological material reveals a settled character of Saltovian economy and animal husbandry from the forest-steppe zone. The settled character of animal breeding is suggested by the dominance of cattle and the significant presence of the domestic pig in the domestic herd, while the small cattle had a subordinate role in economy. The important role of the domestic horse (after cattle) represents a specific feature of the Saltovian domestic herd that distinguishes the Saltovian archaeozoological complexes from other agriculture based cultures from Eastern Europe. The third part of the work proposes a comparative analysis of the archaeozoological complexes from Middle Age of Kharkov Region.

Scientific research using non-destructive methods or micro-destructive modern of works of art is essential to the smooth running of the process of conservation and restoration. Knowing the nature of the materials used in their manufacturing brings us important clues in the authentication and dating of works of art. A work of art, historical textile was handmade of natural materials available to designers in the period. Most of these textile treasures, counting a number of notable tracks were preserved over the centuries by the Church in warehouses, museums or other sheltered locations. The present study refers to the investigation of metal accessories through X-ray fluorescence, OM and SEM of religious textiles kept a hundred years in the north tower of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Iasi. This paper aims to determine the metal parts (threads, sequins) and identification of corrosion products in order to establish a correlation with the conservation status of textile pieces.

The paper deals with the need to analyze the interpretation of the term „theater criticism” and revision of established views on this concept. Unfortunately, the understanding of the basic tasks and functions of theater criticism is often limited by modern reflections. Also sometimes the hermeneutical function of criticism is unjustifiably ignored. We cannot forget about the scientific understanding of the theatrical process component. The specificity of theatre criticism as a kind of artistic creativity found some generalization at the "Code of Practice" of the International Association of Theatre Critics. All of these factors directly influenced on the formation of an indefinite space of criticism in today’s theatrical process. More and more often quite inaccurate phrase „theater journalism” can be found at scientific literature. The situations with difficult delimitation of theater criticism function today even more overdue in Ukraine. Due to economic conditions, the situation of publishing media, the need for reform of theater arts and education, with a change in the reader’s consciousness, the theater criticism is increasingly turning into a hobby. Is there a future for the profession of theater critic, and what transformations can comprehend it?