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Europe » Adam and Eve and the Serpent, Glass Icon
Ref: 3247
The village of Nicula in Central Transylvania became a centre of pilgrimage when a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary occurred there in the 18th century and a cottage industry sprung up producing small reverse painted icons on glass to sell to the peasants on Fair and Festival days.
There were glass icon industries in other religious centres in Central and Western Europe, such as at Sandl in Austria, where trained artists copied print images onto glass but with little emphasis on the chromatic and decorative - the Nicula icons were something entirely different and original, made by the untrained peasants themselves they were vibrantly colourful, simplified and abstract, with a wonderfully naïve representational style - the opportunity to express themselves through art had produced a fortuitous flowering of the Romanian folk sensibility.
Painted onto thin and cheap glass panels it is remarkable that any have survived at all and this one typically has paint losses but the attractive subject matter and joyful spirit survive. The serpent is a friendly and smiling one and there are bands of flat colour and a child-like quality to the figures and little thought at all of sin and death. The Orthodox Church in the later 19th century tried to ban the trade in Nicula icons saying they were ugly and would frighten children but what they really meant was that they seemed to "mock" the Church - with the hindsight of Modern art we can see beyond the subject matter and appreciate them for their remarkable folk art interest and aesthetic charm.
In original pine frame with original wooden back/cover.
Provenance: private collection, Hungary.
Nicula c.1800 - 50
H: 30cm (11.8in)
W: 25cm (9.8in)
D: 1cm (0.4in)
SOLD
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