Icon of the Creation of the World
1775 to 1800
A small panel tells the whole opening of the Book of Genesis in a grid of scenes. Read it from the top left: God, painted in a white robe, creates light, then the firmament, the earth and the waters, the sun and the moon, the birds and fish, and the animals and Adam. The seventh day, God resting, fills the round medallion at the centre, surrounded by a dark ring of angels. Around and below it come the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, the temptation, the expulsion, their labour on the earth, and finally the murder of Abel by Cain. Bands of red inscriptions in Church Slavonic explain each scene.
The icon was painted in central Russia in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and its refined miniature style, with slender figures, soft greens and browns and a gilded ground, points to Palekh, the village northeast of Vladimir whose workshops were famous for small, detailed icons. Bring your face close: each scene is only a few centimetres across, yet the trees, the animals and the tiny expressions are all legible. Notice how the same figure of God appears again and again, always in white, which is the way icon painters showed the divine light rather than a human body.
The Petit Palais is not where you would expect to find icons, but it holds one of the best collections in France thanks to Roger Cabal, a Parisian collector who gave the museum more than two hundred Russian and Greek icons in the years around 1998. They are shown in a dedicated room. This panel is one of the most complete narrative icons in the group, and it shows how the tradition survived into the age of Catherine the Great with its language intact.
Did You Know? The whole story from the first day of Creation to the death of Abel fits on a panel little bigger than a sheet of office paper.
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