Tinatin Virsaladze

(1907, Tbilisi – 1985, Tbilisi)

Art historian, researcher of the medieval Georgian mural painting. In 1924, after leaving school she went to Academy of Arts, Department of Painting and, in parallel, she studied at the Tbilisi University, Department of History, which she graduated from in 1929. She took her post-graduate course in Leningrad. Her supervisor was a well-known Byzantine scholar Dimitri Ainalov. She worked as a Head of Department at the “Metekhi” Museum of Fine Art. She was one of the founders of the Chubinashvili Institute of History of Georgian Art.  

From 1941 till the end of her life, she worked at the Chubinashvili Institute of History of Georgian Art, for a quarter of a century she headed Fine Arts Department and then Medieval Fine Arts Department. She was closely connected with the heritage protection as a scientific consultant of the mural painting restoration projects.  

Her works were of a crucial significance for the study of the medieval Georgian mural painting, identification of its historical stages, regional schools of painting and certain peculiarities of individual monuments. At the same time she devoted many of her works to the study of the 19th and 20th cc. Georgian fine art.  

High was her authority not only among the Georgian scholars, but the researchers of the Byzantine and entire East-Christian art.