Illustration
An image that accompanies, explains and supplements a text; a kind of graphic art defined by its purpose rather than a genre in the classical sense.
An illustration (Latin illustratio, “vivid representation”) is an image made to elucidate and supplement a description, a story or other written matter, usually in a book or periodical. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine defines it as a kind of printed graphic art and a part of book design, alongside the cover, head- and tailpieces and the lettering.
Illustration is not a genre in the classical sense. Genres (history, portrait, scenes of everyday life, landscape, still life) are distinguished by subject matter, whereas illustration is defined by purpose — its tie to a text; an illustration may itself be a portrait, a landscape or a battle scene. It is therefore listed among genres in this glossary only by convention. There are also independent illustrations: sheets that exist apart from the book block.
The forerunner of illustration was the manuscript miniature, known since ancient Egypt. The first printed illustrations were woodcuts; metal engraving spread in the sixteenth century, and in the nineteenth century wood engraving and lithography made large editions possible. In Ukraine the first third of the twentieth century is marked by the book graphics of Heorhii Narbut, Vasyl Krychevskyi and Anatol Petrytskyi; the 1960s brought a new flowering — Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors illustrated by Heorhii Yakutovych (1967) and the Eneida of Anatolii Bazylevych (1968). More recently the illustrations of Vladyslav Yerko (The Snow Queen, 2000) have won high regard.
