The Iconography of Saint Nicetas the Great Martyr: Rare Icons and Pattern Drawings

The article examines the icon “Saint Nicetas the Great Martyr Trampling the Demon” from the collection of the State Historical Museum, distinguished by a rare iconographic type. In museum documentation, the work had previously been associated with the Stroganov icon-painting tradition, although both its painterly characteristics and its state of preservation raised doubts concerning such an attribution. A more thorough investigation has demonstrated that the icon originated from the St. Nicholas Edinoverie Monastery, which received numerous rarities from the collection of the priestless Old Believers of the Preobrazhenskoe Almshouse community. A small group of copies and icon-pattern drawings deriving iconographically from the icon under study has also been identified. Technical and technological analyses have made it possible to establish that the work was executed no later than the first half of the seventeenth century. This dating is further corroborated through comparison between the original icon and a 1902 copy painted by Vasilii Pavlovich Guryanov and now preserved in the State Russian Museum. The icon depicts the heavenly patron of Nikita Grigorievich Stroganov (1560–1616) and was most likely created during his lifetime by one of the leading painters of the Stroganov workshops.

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