La Madre de Dios con el Niño

In the early 1880s the young Mikhail Vrubel came to Kyiv to work on the ancient church of Saint Cyril, helping restore its medieval frescoes and painting new icons for a marble iconostasis. This Mother of God, finished in 1885, was one of them. He kept to the strict rules of Orthodox icon painting, the frontal pose, the gold ground, the long solemn faces, and yet the faces themselves were real people. For the Virgin he used the wife of Adrian Prakhov, the art historian who had hired him, and for the child their young daughter. The result unsettled some viewers, an icon carrying a specific, living sorrow in its eyes. It was this Kyiv work that first brought Vrubel to wider notice, before the tormented demons of his later years.