Caspar Luyken’s Illustrated Bible among the Serbs and Bulgarians in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

The engraving of the Finding of Moses from Caspar Luyken’s Amsterdam (1694) and Nuremberg (1708) bibles served as a model for Teodor Kračun’s painting for the small iconostasis of the Orthodox cathedral in Sremski Karlovci (1780), for the Viennese printer J. G. Mansfeld’s frontispiece of Dositej Obradović’s Poem of the Deliverance of Serbia (1789) and for Dimitar Zograf’s fresco in the vault of the exonarthex of the Rila Monastery (1843). Three different versions of the original copper engraving reveal how Luyken’s Bible was used in support of the cause of religious revival and national liberation of the Serbs and Bulgarians in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires respectively in the late eighteen century and the first half of the nineteenth.