(b Polack [Polotsk], c. 1485; d Prague, c. 1552). Belarusian printer, woodcutter, scholar and mystic. After early schooling in Polask, he graduated from Kraków University in 1506 and gained his doctorate in medicine at Padua University in 1513. In the interim he became secretary to John of Denmark (1481–1513) and acquired a grounding in the liberal arts, Classical languages, botany, astronomy, law and heraldry, as well as the mysticism of Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), whom he quoted. He mastered the south German style of woodcut and studied printing in northern Italy. There he moved in circles frequented by Albrecht Dürer, Johann Reuchlin, Paulus Riccius and Agrippa of Nettesheim and, like them, enjoyed the protection of the Habsburg emperor Maximilian. He shared the prevailing interest in allegory and the cabbala that had its centre in Prague, with its erudite Staronová (Old-New) synagogue. There, between 1517 and 1519, Skaryna translated and printed, in a Belarusian version of Old Slavonic, the Psalter and some 22 books of the Old Testament in a handsome typeface interspersed with rebuses and illustrated with a series of woodcuts and arcane decorated initials. Skaryna continued his work in Vilnius (1522–5) with the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles and a Liber viaticus, comprising interesting prayers in Middle Belarusian and Akathistos hymns illustrative of post-Florentine spirituality and papalism. Some of his prefaces have become classics of Belarusian literature. The work of this Erasmian ecumenist was, however, impeded by bigotry, sequestration, fire and imprisonment. He returned to Prague in the mid-1530s as Gardener Royal and physician to Ferdinand I. Skaryna’s Bible, which had been printed and dispersed in fascicles, was first published as a complete work, in facsimile, in Minsk in 1990.

• Skaryna, Francysk
  • Belarus’, §II: Painting and graphic arts