Russian Icons Room

The room houses sixty Russian icons belonging to the collection of Duska Avrese, professor of Russian Literature at the University of Padua.
In the Orthodox East, icons are first and foremost sacred objects, venerated in churches and in domestic devotion. Icons of Christ and the Mother of God began to fill churches and homes—revealing with the immediate language of images—the mysteries of the new faith. Written reports show the existence of important icons in Russia since the 10th and 11th centuries. Diligent students of the Greeks, Russian iconographers soon acquired their expressive autonomy while still respecting the sacred and immutable canons of the Church of Byzantium.
There are no signatures of the authors, almost always monks; for the idea that they put their hands at the disposal of God, who used them to get closer to man. The first Russian icon painter, according to tradition, was Alipij, a monk who lived at the end of the 11th century in the Kievo-Pecerskij monastery.