The book offers a new, historical and cultural reading of the personal collection of Post-Byzantine and medieval Russian paintings. The discovery, study and collection of medieval icons and early Italian painting, of course, developed along parallel paths in Western Europe and in Russia. In the nineteenth century this was the preserve mainly of amateur archaeologists, and in the next century it was taken up by professional experts (connoisseurs). This volume therefore engages not only with the writings and personal art collections of Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), Roberto Longhi (1890-1970) or Federico Zeri (1921-1998), but also with the typologically similar works and art collections of Pavel Muratov (1881-1950) and Alexander Anisimov (1887-1937), as well as with the private collections of Soviet and modern art historians, many of whom worked as art critics and expert consultants. Many of them had their own small collections of icons and paintings. The author’s private collection of Post-Byzantine and medieval Russian icons, which underpins this volume, also belongs to this type of collection. Each of the ten icons from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reproduced in this book came from a famous collection and is closely connected with the history of the study and collecting of medieval Russian painting in Soviet Russia. Hence the iconography and symbolism of the artistic language of these icons are explored within the broad context of the development of their study…