Russian Icons by Ivanov, Vladimir

New York; (1988): Rizzoli. First Edition. Quarto. 230p. 154 color illustrations of icons, 14 additional color illustrations. Published in cooperation with the Patriarch of Moscow. Printed in a very small print run, this magnificent volume contains one hundred previously unpublished illustrations of icons found in the Archeology Office of the Ecclesiastical Academy in Moscow. The first five chapters take the reader through the end of the sixteenth century with illustrations that have only appeared previously in Russian language editions. Ivanov; however, has produced here over half his text with beautiful photographs of icons never before seen from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Chapter Six, for instance, devoted to the seventeenth century and the longest in the book may be regarded as the focal point of the work. The span of ten centuries covered by Ivanov indicates that his book is in part a celebration of the one-thousandth anniversary of the Christianiazation of Russia. A beautiful copy bound in white cloth lettered in brown, spine lettering brown, pictorial endpapers, fine in fine pictorial dust jacket and publisher's slipcase.