On June 11th, the National Library will host the opening of an exhibition “The spirit of religious traditions and printed icons” form the stocks of the Belarusian State Museum of Folk Architecture and Rural Lifestyle and Fr. J.K. Kluk Museum of Agriculture (Ciechanowiec, Poland).
The offered exposition features over 70 exhibits printed in the late XIX – early XX centuries in European printing-houses in a complex and very laborious technique of chromolithograph. This method allowed transmitting all colors of the original and publishing quality printed copies of icons. The result was splendid, and at present people still admire the beauty of these old color icons.
Among Orthodox icons presented at the exhibition there are highly artistic chromolithographs by E.I. Fesenko, the publisher from Odessa who won the first prize at the Milan World Expo, and also chromolithographs on plates by I.D. Sytin. The icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa is the rarest and most interesting of Catholic icons. Its originality is that when changing the foreshortening before the spectator three images open unexpectedly, like a wonder: St. Antony of Padua, the Guardian Angel and Our Lady.
Along with museum collections of old printed icons , the exhibition features books from the stocks of the National Library of Belarus. Visitors will see reprints of Belarusian oearly-printed editions of the XVI–XVIII centuries with black-and-white and color icons (printers Spiridon Sobol, Alexander Tarasevich) and originals of the ХІХ – early ХХ centuries, editions on the history of book-printing, encyclopedias devices for chromolithography, catalogs of printed icons of the biggest private printing-houses.
The event starts at 4 p.m. in the gallery “Labyrinth” (on the 3rd floor). The exhibition “The spirit of religious traditions and printed icons” will run till 27 August, 2015.
Contact telephones: (+375 17) 293 28 33, 293 27 56.
Е-mail: pr@nlb.by
