Cossack era
The period of Ukrainian history and culture from the late fifteenth to the second half of the eighteenth century, tied to the existence of the Cossacks as an estate, and the corresponding body of art and dress: portraits of Cossack officers, Pokrova icons with Cossacks, and officers' costume.
The word «Cossack» appears in the sources in the second half of the fifteenth century; the earliest references to Ukrainian Cossacks concern the years 1489 and 1492. By the mid-sixteenth century Cossacking had become a way of life in the Dnipro region and Podillia; from the 1570s the Cossacks acquired the rights of an estate, and after the revolution of the mid-seventeenth century they became the ruling estate of the Hetmanate. The upper limit of the era is marked by the dismantling of the Cossack order: the office of hetman was abolished in 1764, the Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed in 1775, and the regimental system of the Hetmanate was abolished in the early 1780s. Art historians accordingly distinguish a «Cossack» and a «post-Cossack» period.
In art the Cossacks left above all the portrait: donor and secular portraits of hetmans, colonels, officers and their wives, and family galleries of officer families. They share a flat, static pose, carefully rendered dress and insignia (the mace or pernach), a coat of arms and an inscription giving name and rank. A separate group is the «Cossack Pokrova» icons of the Protection of the Mother of God, in which a hetman, officers and clergy are shown beneath her veil. The early layer includes the engravings accompanying the verses for the funeral of Petro Sahaidachnyi and Wilhelm Hondius's engraved portrait of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi.
The dress of Cossack officers in the second half of the seventeenth and the first third of the eighteenth century kept an Oriental style in its Polish, noble variant and differed sharply from contemporary Western European fashion. Its basis was the zhupan girded with a sash, wide trousers, morocco boots and a fur cap; over the zhupan were worn the delia, the ferezia or the cloak called opancha and, from the 1660s, the kuntush with slit sleeves, which paired with the zhupan became the chief mark of the Hetmanate elite. Status was shown by costly fabrics (brocade, satin, damask, fine broadcloth) and by cord and galloon trimming.
The Cossack era should not be confused with «Cossack Baroque»: that is the name of a style, chiefly architectural, current in the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century in the Hetmanate, Sloboda Ukraine and Zaporizhzhia, whereas the Cossack era is a broader historical and cultural notion.
