The Revelation of Saint John the Theologian

Most of what this workshop produced was painted, icons and church walls in tempera and gold, so a sheet like this one is a different kind of object. It is a drawing, worked up in pencil, ink and pen on paper in 1840, of scenes from the Book of Revelation, the visions of the end of the world that John the Theologian received. Apocalypse scenes like these were often painted in the open porches of large Balkan churches, where the congregation would pass them on the way in. By the 1840s the Samokov painters were reaching beyond old Byzantine models and studying printed images arriving from Western Europe, and a drawing was where those borrowed compositions were tried out and adapted. The paper holds the working stage, before any of it reached a wall.