Ivan Myhura
Ukrainian engraver, portraitist and icon painter of the Baroque age, known in monastic life as Hilarion; his full name was Ivan Detesovych Myhura. His birth and death dates are unknown; he died some time after 1712.
Born in Kyiv into a well-off family, he studied at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, completing the full course of rhetoric, philosophy and theology, and later taught there himself — syntax in 1702–1703 and poetics in 1703–1704. He took monastic vows at St Sophia in 1703 and became archdeacon of the St Sophia monastery in 1704; it is by that title that he signed his engraving in honour of Mazepa. From 1709 to 1712 he was hegumen of the St Nicholas Krupytsky monastery near Baturyn; nothing is known of him afterwards.
He worked chiefly in large copperplate engraving — the sheets he himself called "Theses in honour of…". These are panegyric compositions of the Ukrainian Baroque, dense with verse texts, emblems and allegorical figures; for all their high rhetoric, their structure stays lucid and monumental.
Among his known sheets are "Saint Barbara" (1700) and panegyrics to Zakhariy Kornylovych (1703), Andriy Voynarovsky (1703), Hedeon Odorsky (1704), Ivan Mazepa (1706), Stefan Yavorsky (1706), Vasyl Kochubey (1708), Ivan Skoropadsky (1709) and Danylo Apostol (1712). He also painted portraits of Voynarovsky and Metropolitan Varlaam Yasynsky, and executed icon commissions for churches and monasteries.Collection1