Birth of Mary - Icon - Limewood - First half 18th century
Are you interested in this item?This item is up for auction at Catawiki. Please click on "respond to advert" (orange button) to get redirected to the Catawiki website. Catawiki’s goal is to make special objects universally available. Our weekly auctions feature thousands of unusual, rare, and exceptional objects you won’t find in just any store. The upper part is dedicated to the traditional scene of the gifts offering, which were long the basis of all the pictures dedicated to this theme. It depicts Anne lying down on the bed toward which a group of virgins generally comes to offer gifts (cups and goblets) and fans, giving the depicted event the aura of a solemn ritual.Here, however, the event is more intimate, lyrical, because the baby is brought to her mother, while her father Joachim celebrates at a laid table. The lower part of the icon represents another event of the childhood of Mary: the maids bath the baby - a required scene in all the birth pictures of the Orthodox iconography.The peculiarity of this icon is certainly the representation that the artist composed without trying to merge all the episodes of the cycle, but introducing a distribution of the icon on different registers, which allows the main scene of the presentation of the baby to take a dominant position.In the structuring of this composition a particular role is given to the architectural backgrounds, whose shapes recall theatre wings and Western architectural motifs.U.P.The birth of Mary.Northern Russia, Vyg.Tempera, school of the Old Believers.18th century.54 x 46 cm. Read more