Scenes of the Life of Saint Nicholas of Velikoretsk

This icon’s graceful, elongated figures, with small, sensitively modelled heads and extremities, and the lush colour scheme combining gold with a range of blues and pinks, provide a fine example of the refined taste of the Russian capital and are undoubtedly the work of a miniaturist who painted in the workshop of the czar.

In the Orthodox Christian tradition, icons (from the Greek ikon, “image”) have a profound theological significance that distinguishes them from other pious images. Icons are placed on an iconostasis, where they are venerated as sacred objects, and their production is subject to specific rules. The art of the icon, which developed in Byzantium – the Eastern Roman Empire – influenced the earliest figures painted in western Europe during the Middle Ages.