On view from November 19 through February 12, the Walters Art Museum will present “Sacred Arts and City Life: The Glory of Medieval Novgorod,” featuring approximately 290 objects, including about 35 iconic artifacts, that examine the art and culture of Russia’s oldest medieval city – Veliky Novgorod or Novgorod the Great.

The exhibit will trace the artistic and material culture of Novgorod from the Ninth Century, through its Golden Age in the Fourteenth Century, to its eclipse by Moscow in the Sixteenth Century. Ecclesiastical objects from Novgorod’s many churches highlight its cultural achievements. This exhibition was organized by the Walters Art Museum in collaboration with The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, and the Novgorod Museum Federation.

“As the only US venue of the exhibition, the Walters Art Museum is pleased to present Novgorod’s magnificent heritage,” said Walters director Gary Vikan. “Visitors will see the transcendental world of religious art juxtaposed with a vivid window into the rugged everyday life of people, who some 800 years ago inhabited the frosty Russian North.”

Novgorod’s early history is well documented, and the city remains one of the world’s centers for studying medieval urban life. The exhibition begins by examining the walled city’s geography. Recorded as early as 859, Novgorod – 100 miles south of St Petersburg – was founded on the banks of the Volkhov River, the principal water route uniting the Baltic and the Black Seas.

In 988, the Byzantine-Orthodox form of Christianity was accepted in Russia. Novgorod’s adoption of Christianity from the Byzantine Empire determined the Eastern orientations of its religious culture and supplanted indigenous pagan cults. Objects marked with pagan symbols and totems gradually were replaced by Christian imagery and amulets.

Twelfth Century necklace, pressed and welded bronze. Courtesy Novogrod State Museum.

One of the most important sites in Novgorod is the Cathedralof St Sophia, built in stone from 1045 to 1050. It is the city’sspiritual center and one of its most impressive architecturalmonuments. In a city constructed almost entirely of wood, theerection of stone churches, especially of St Sophia, testify to thedesire to construct religious edifices symbolic of the permanenceof heaven.

A set of monumental gilt-copper doors and an openwork lamp from the Cathedral of St Sophia will be displayed together with selected icons and scale models of some of the other churches that established Novgorod’s reputation as a major center of religious life.

Worshippers used these icons to request the help of the saints depicted and often looked to these saints for help with specific activities, including their livelihoods. This is exemplified in the exhibition by a Fifteenth Century icon of Saints Florus and Laurus with Saints Blaise and Spyridon, depicted respectively with a steed of horses and a herd of cattle.

This will be one of the first exhibitions to integrate icons with objects from daily life, demonstrating the connection between religious imagery and the concerns of the city’s citizens.

Novgorod’s soil containing clay deposits has preserved intact organic materials on a scale unlike any other archeological site from the Middle Ages. Beginning in the Tenth Century, the townspeople improved their streets every 20 to 25 years, putting a new layer of rough-hewn pine logs on top of old ones.

Iconostasis doors with the Annuciation, Saint Basil and Saint John Chrysostom, late Fifteenth to early Sixteenth Century, tempera on wood. Courtesy State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Each layer can be scientifically dated by means ofdendrochronology (the study of the year-rings in tree trunks);objects such as wooden toys, leather goods and even birch-barkletters that have been recovered intact from the soil can beprecisely dated by the layer in which they were found.

In places, as many as 20 to 30 layers have been uncovered. Large photomurals of the excavation will be part of the exhibition.

Novgorod was a city full of craftsmen who worked to produce objects used at every social stratum of the burgeoning city. Excavations have yielded the remains of about 150 artisans’ workshops, offering a glimpse of an advanced and prolific system of craft production.

Selected objects like musical instruments, minstrels’ masks and toys speak to the experience of urban life and stand in contrast to the otherworldly character of the city’s religious art.

An illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibit and is for sale in the museum store.

Museum hours are Wednesday to Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm. For information, 410-547-9000 or www.thewalters.org.