The largest digital archive of Russian arts and crafts has appeared online, including ancient patterns, ornaments, and murals made with all kinds of materials.
As part of the Ornamika project (ornamika.com), a team of 26 developers and illustrators spent two years collecting and digitizing folk art held in libraries, museums, and private collections. Each piece was given a detailed description, thus creating a structured, easily searchable archive.
The website is divided into sections by geography, century, type of art (carving, embroidery, book illustration, etc.), composition, elements, and type of object or surface (headpiece, furniture, textile, etc.). The archive contains a total of more than 7,000 publicly available digitized pieces of authentic Russian artwork from the 9th to the 20th centuries.
“The purpose of Ornamika is to make these beautiful, authentic styles of the different peoples of Russia accessible and understandable to everyone on the planet,” says project founder Maria Loleit.
The website creators promise to launch English and Chinese versions in the near future.
Below are links to some of the ornaments, spanning a wide range of centuries, techniques, and geography.
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