7 - Visuality Explodes: Russians in Turn-of-the-Century Sources

Summary

Chapter 7 explores the explosion of visual sources about Russia in the second half of the sixteenth century. Most notorious of them were the illustrated pamphlets about Ivan the Terrible’s attack on Livonia during the Baltic wars of the 1560s, where Ivan and his army were often depicted as hated Turks. An entirely different image of Muscovy was projected in costume books of the time, where the “typical dress” of Muscovite men and women resembled that of other Europeans, even if it was somewhat fanciful for lack of eyewitness knowledge. Finally, late sixteenth-century maps of Muscovy provide some illustration as well, often repurposing images from Herberstein’s account and costume books.