Bogatyr

A hero measured by his horse

The bogatyr is the mounted warrior of East Slavic epic, and in that tradition the animal is not scaled to life. It is scaled to the story: the hero's strength is stated by what he can be carried by, and a horse that would be implausible in a field is exactly right in a legend. That is a function, and it is a different one from anything in the war or sport sections of this register. The animal is not transport or weapon here. It is a unit of measurement for the man on it.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1898 and the location is the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. No dimensions are recorded. Symbolism is the recorded style and Russian the nationality attached to the painter. The record files the work under Animal Art and Animal Art > Horse together with cultural heritage, mythology and fantasy headings — the tag combination this catalogue uses for a subject drawn from a story — and the measured colour family of the image is neutral.

Where the mythology tag is doing real work

This register has flagged the mythology heading repeatedly as an artefact, because it lands on portraits of living men and on ordinary landscapes. Here it fits. Recording both facts is more honest than treating the tag as always meaningless or always meaningful, and a reader who knows when a field is reliable knows more than one who is only told it is unreliable.