Chernivtsi Regional Art Museum is proud of having restored the late 19th century pilgrimage icon The Lives of the Saints. It is an oil painting. The icon was dirty and whole layers of paint were dropping out when it got to the museum. Painter-restorer Volodymyr Krasnov spent four years restoring the icon.
The artwork consists of three parts. The center of the canvas shows the interior of the Church of the Resurrection [better known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. – Ed.] in Jerusalem, surrounded by images of some other holy places and numerous saints and martyrs. The scenes of Doomsday are placed top center in two tiers. Large oval-framed images of Jesus Christ and the Mother of God are on the right and the left of the icon. The scenes from the Old Testament are placed top right and top left, while the legends of Lot and the True Cross are depicted bottom right and bottom left together with the legends about some saints. “Written sources of the images are the Bible and theological works. This icon is a unique encyclopedia of iconographic subjects. By studying them, we are kind of traveling in time, from the Creation to the 19th century events that were relevant for the history of the holy places,” head of the research and educational work department of the museum Larysa Kurushchak says. She adds that analyzing scenes in the central and lower parts of the icon was the most difficult part of the research effort. The scholars were helped by the Right Reverend Meletius, Bishop of Khotyn. “He interpreted many obscure scenes, read and restored the lost fragments of the numerous inscriptions with liturgical meaning that were written in Cyrillic and Greek,” the scholar says.
“Since this inscription refers to Jerusalem, and the main part of the icon, that is, its center depicts a Jerusalem church, we have decided to rename the artwork as The Holy City of Jerusalem instead of The Lives of the Saints. We were also able to identify the meanings of all the scenes in the icon,” Kurushchak explains.
Four icons similar to the Chernivtsi one are extant today. Artworks from the Syrian monastery of Sednaya and the Hermitage collections in Saint Petersburg come close enough in their content, but the icon from a church in Bulgarian Nesebar comes closest in its composition. “The Chernivtsi icon covers various events in temporal and spatial dimensions. The central image of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is surrounded by more than a hundred medallions and stamps that depict a huge number of persons and buildings. The icon was probably created by several folk artists with varying skill levels. It is discernible in the style of the work,” Kurushchak says.
The Holy City of Jerusalem is an example of a rare type of icons, the pilgrimage ones. These artworks were painted on canvas, allowing them to be easily folded into a roll and accompany pilgrims in their travels. They were in great demand among the pilgrims who used them to describe their experiences in the Holy Land.
