Folk Art of Europe & Rest of World »
Early Romanian Icon on Glass
Ref: 4997
A soldier once took refuge in a village church in Central Transylvania & witnessed a miracle along the lines of an ikon of the Virgin weeping blood, as I recall the legend, anyway the church ever after became a place of pilgrimage for the Orthodox Romanian peasantry, & some of the locals took to painting icons to sell to visitors, painted on hand-made glass sheets and encased in simple pine frames with pine backs to protect them these small icons are like vestiges of medieval times, highly abstract & colourful & with a representational style that is charmingly naive.
Any you can find are rare survivals, this one depicts the Eleanor & Constantin, the rulers of Byzantium, an important icon theme for the Eastern Church, ever threatened at the time this was made by Ottoman incursions, what most notable however is the colour, the wonderful combination of blue, white, red & green, with what appears to be gold leaf.
Nicula c.1800
H: 33cm (13.0in)
W: 28cm (11.0in)
D: 1cm (0.4in)
SOLD
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