St. Nicholas - 19th Century Russian Icon

Russian iconographer Central Russia (Palech or Mstera area), mid-19th century Saint Nicholas Egg tempera on panel, 35×31 cm. The icon depicts St. Nicholas of Myra in a half-length pose, following the established type of Nikolai Čudotvorec ("Nicholas the Thaumaturge"), the most popular saint of the entire Russian Orthodox devotion. The bishop is depicted in pontifical robes - red felonium sprinkled with golden crosses, green homophorion with golden crosses - with his right hand raised in a blessing gesture and his left hand holding an open Gospel. The text in Slavonic characters shows a passage from the Gospel of John (Jn. 8:12 ff.), which can be read in the usual liturgical version. At the upper corners, within small arches, appear the figures of Christ blessing on the left and the Mother of God on the right: a reference to the hagiographic episode of the Council of Nicaea (325), in which tradition relates that Nicholas received the Gospel and the homophorion from heaven directly from the hands of Christ and the Virgin, after being deprived of his episcopal insignia for slapping the heretic Arius. The gold background is entirely engraved with geometric and floral motifs - rhombuses, chevrons, rosettes - covering the entire free surface of the panel using the čekan (cold punching) technique, a distinctive feature of the production of the Palech and Mstera workshops in the second half of the 19th century. The nimbus is radiated with very fine incised lines. The quality of execution, the refinement of the punching, and the chromatic vividness of the flesh tones-modeled with a certain plastic sensibility of academic derivation-all point the attribution toward these two Central Russian schools, among the most prolific and technically advanced of the 19th century.