My son Mykhailo jokingly said to me while I was researching this book: ‘Tato, your book is going to revolutionise the way people think about carpathian Last Judgment icons.’ The joke, of course, is that no one really thinks about this topic anyway. And he knew too that I had set my sights rather higher. What I was trying to do was to find a new way to write history.

It might be helpful if I explain the train of thought that set this project off. I was struck by Ernest Gellner’s observation that nationalist intellectuals in the nineteenth century...

It is one of the mysteries of East European art history that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Rus’ churches in the Carpathians were suddenly adorned with numerous icons of high quality and distinctive composition, the antecedents of which are unclear. Ukrainian scholars generally argue that these icons are but the continuation of the iconographic tradition of kyiv and Halych; they are unable, however, to marshal sufficient evidence. Many Polish scholars argue that the icons are Balkan or Moldavian in origin, but they also are unable to produce convincing proofs.¹ In this chapter, I will propose a different solution of...

This chapter, like the previous chapter, concentrates on icons painted on wood, leaving icons on canvas and murals on the walls of churches for the next chapter.

Here I outline the geography of the surviving icons of the Last Judgment. Of course, this is not identical with establishing the range of the icons when they were originally painted since the rate of destruction was probably not equal across the territory where they existed, and probably some regions were better collected than others. The extant icons, nonetheless, are the best evidence we have to indicate their diffusion over time, and they...

By the nineteenth century, Last Judgment iconography had largely disappeared in our region. If any Last Judgment images continued to be produced here, they were not the large works painted on linden boards with egg tempera. Materials and methods changed, as did tastes and interests. The eighteenth century saw the disintegration of what had been a vigorous tradition over the preceding several centuries. This is what we explore in this chapter.

Linden boards remained the dominant material for Last Judgment icons through the first half of the seventeenth century, but after that they were rarely used. The collection of icons...

I am dividing these conclusions into two parts. The first, shorter part recapitulates, in point form, the major conclusions that flow from the evidence and argument of this book. Some of these conclusions are firmly established by the evidence; others are rather suggestions. The second part of the chapter consists of methodological reflections.

The Carpathian icons of the Last Judgment originated, probably in the fifteenth century, in the region around Staryi Sambir (Poliana, Mshanets’, Lavriv, Spas), which remained the heartland of this set of sacred images. In the sixteenth century the icons spread in a scattered way to localities in...