This book presents the finest examples of late-Russian iconography (16th to early 20th Century), with works showing rare subjects, such as Christ aching in the Synagogue by an unknown royal iconographer of the end of the 17th century, or the 19th-century Depiction of an Iconostasis. These masterpieces reveal a whole seam of the nation`s cultural inheritance that until recently had been reatively unknown even to specialists. Assembled ring the revolutionary years at Kolomenskoye, a forrmer royal estate in the south-east of Moscow transformed into a Museum of Ancient Russian, this unique collection of Russian icons hides complete sets of icons from the interiors ruined or destroyed churches and monasteries.
Masterpieces from the Kolomenskoye Collection comprise icons dating back to the time of Ivan Terrible (1530-84), when the originality of local iconographic schools based on ancient centres such as Novgorod, Pskov and Tver largely disappeared under Moscow`s new leadership. Peter the Great`s reforms in the 17th Century gave way to western influence in all spheres of Russian lifestyle; Russian iconography underwent major changes in themes, styles and details, with historical figures, landscapes and architectural elements featured, me icons of this showed the architecture of a ole town, such as the panorama of Veliky Ustyug a mid-17th-century icon, or a view of Archangel painted in 1741. By drawing attention to fragments from the icons, this book invites the reader to look to carefully at masterpieces and to investigate details themselves.