Press releases

MINSK, 10 June (BelTA) - More than 70 exhibits will be on display at the exhibition The Spirit of Religious Traditions and Print Icons which will open in Minsk on 11 June, BelTA learned from the National Library of Belarus, the project organizer.

The exposition will showcase two separate collections of old color-printed icons which existed as an art phenomenon in the territories with strong ethnic, confessional and historical ties. The exhibits have been loaned from the Belarusian State Museum of Folk Architecture and Rural Lifestyle and the Fr. J.K. Kluk Museum of Agriculture (Ciechanowiec, Poland). They were printed at the end of the 19th - early 20th centuries in the European print printing houses. The publishers used a very laborious technique of chromolithography to transfer all the original colors and publish high-quality printed religious images in large amounts. The result was such that even today people admire the beauty of the old color-printed icons.

Among Orthodox icons presented at the exhibition will be highly artistic chromolithographs by Yefim Fesenko, the publisher from Odessa who won the first prize at the Milan World Expo, and also chromolithographs on plates by Ivan Sytin. The icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa is the rarest and most interesting of Catholic icons. When changing the angle the spectator sees three images: St. Antony of Padua, the Guardian Angel and Our Lady.

Along with museum collections of old printed icons, the exhibition will feature books from the holdings of the National Library of Belarus. Visitors will see reprints of Belarusian early-printed editions of the 16th -18th centuries with black-and-white and color icons and the originals of the 19th - early 20th centuries, the editions on the history of book-printing, encyclopedias about the devices for chromolithography, catalogues of printed icons of the biggest private printing-houses.

The Spirit of Religious Traditions and Printed Icons exhibition will stay open until 27 August.