At long last – we are finally able to offer high quality description cards that match our mounted icons. These will be included with each mounted icon purchase.
With: Specific descriptors on the origin of the icon; a concise description of the icon and subject; a brief explanation about icons; and a photo from St. Isaac of Syria Skete.
Over the many years since our first icon catalogue in 1989, many have asked us for more general information on what an icon means, and for more specific information about each individual icon that we offer. Our icon catalogues have grown from that first 12 page black-and-white catalogue until our last color 128 page 8th Edition Catalogue which has 818 unique and individual icons gathered from many cultures, times, and places throughout the world across the 2,000 year history of the Church. Since Christ made the first icon by pressing His Face to a cloth, and St. Luke painted the Virgin’s form from life, icons have been the primary visual art of the Christian Church, yet they are just now becoming more familiar in many places in the Western world.
We began to gather as much information as we could find about these different icons over those many years, and started to put them into a final publishable form with a color reproduction of the icon just opposite its specific information. This includes specific descriptors when available of the heritage, school, date, style, location, and iconographer, as well as a concise usually two paragraph description of that particular icon, feast, or saint all in clear readable type. In addition, on the back of this paper (the same high quality paper on which we make our icon reproduction prints), we have included a general description of icons, an explanation of where the word icon comes from, and the spiritual meaning of this spiritual and transcendent art which is considered the theology of the Church expressed in visual form. There is also a fine picture of the road and trees leading back to the quiet rural valley in which St. Isaac of Syria Skete is located.
Wanting to provide these free for every regular catalogue icon has been a daunting effort and a sizeable amount of work. We are finished at last! with all of our regular catalogue icons of Jesus, of the Virgin Mary Theotokos, Festal series, Holy Prophets, and the Saints. This is about 818 icon summaries. Condensing so much information to a small and predictable space has been a challenge, but a good one. We hope and pray that this additional information will help you enjoy your icon, learn about its particular history and meaning, or that of its type, saint or feast, and to share this information with anyone who would enquire about it as they enjoy the beauty of each one of our wonderful and diverse icons in our extensive and widely diverse icon collection.
We are producing these icon summaries in-house, and although we have hundreds of books showing and explaining many of our icons, no collection of books from so many different countries could ever be complete. If you happen to know more information and a source for that information that would relate to any of our icon reproductions, we would be very grateful if you could share that with us, so the next time we print more icon summaries of that particular icon it would be more comprehensive and helpful. Thank you.