Icons painted on glass

An icon on glass is, more precisely, an icon painted on the back of the glass. It reached Transylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries along the Bavaria–Austria–Bohemia route, tied to the ceramics and glass crafts brought by the Habani, a religious sect from Bohemia who settled mostly around Alba.

The craft entered Transylvania through Nicula Monastery, a few kilometres from Gherla, in Cluj county. The drawing is naive but suggestive, the composition simple and clear, without anatomical proportion or perspective, yet chromatically balanced.

Painters worked from izvoade — pencil tracings on paper taken from older icons. The izvod was laid under the piece of glass, and the graphic skeleton copied from it was called the “urzeală”: the same word as the warp threads stretched on a loom.

We do not yet have our own photograph of an icon on glass. The glass-blowing pictures that come up when you search “artist sticlar” show an entirely different trade.