The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

"Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks." - Samuel Johnson, English writer (1709-1784)

I don't normally equate where I live in central Florida -- orange groves, a world-famous mouse, grazing cattle, and the errant alligator or two -- with Old World culture or art. But in a wonderful slice of lagniappe*, a co-worker recently tipped me off to a temporary exhibit of Russian icons at nearby Florida Southern College. Entitled "Sacred Visions: Masterworks from the Museum of Russian Icons", the exhibit consists of 25 works from the private collection of Gordon Lankton, an entrepreneur whose business dealings took him to Russia and the discovery of religious icons surfacing again post-glastnost after decades of hiding from Bolshevics and Communists.

The icons on exhibit are as old as the 17th century and as recent as the early 21st century. Some of them feature favorite Russian saints (such as Paraskevi and Nicholas), others feature patriarchs from the Old Testament, one depicts a liturgical calendar, but most of them center around the Virgin Mary in the mode typical of Byzantine art -- stiff, one-dimensional frontal poses, solemn dark eyes, and holding the Child Jesus on a non-existent lap against a heavenly background. Like the Gothic art and architecture I've been studying, the symbolism and uniformity of subject matter of these pieces make it easy to understand icons as objects of instruction as well as veneration.

But beyond subject matter or motif, it's their sheer illumination that strikes you as enter the room (the afternoon I visited, I was the only one in the small gallery, and the icons stood in stark contrast to the bare white walls behind them). They seem to glow from within, and you can easily imagine how the family icon would become a captivating presence in a humble Russian home. The gallery provides the visitor with a magnifying glass, inviting you to get up close and examine the careful tempera brush strokes that bring this "gold" to life. So the obsession with light as representative of the heavenly realm continues long after the completion of the last Gothic cathedral!

Now back in the light after nearly a century of hiding in darkness, it's clear these treasures have not lost their shine nor their power!

(* lagniappe -- term originating in New Orleans referring to an unexpected blessing, something extra, a serendipitous gift such as the thirteenth beignet in a "baker's dozen")