The icon of the 16th century from the collection of the Voronezh Regional Art Museum named after Ivan Kramskoy displays the image of one of the seven main Christian angels — the Archangel Gabriel. The Greek word “angel” means “messenger, ” “missionary, ” and the prefix “arch” indicates his seniority.

The Archangel is represented as a beautiful young man with wings. According to Christian tradition, Gabriel comes to earth to proclaim God’s plan to people. It was he who brought the good news of the forthcoming birth of Her son to the Virgin Mary, he also informed Her of Her imminent death. In the Old Testament, through the archangel Gabriel, the mysteries of the future are revealed to the prophet Daniel and the coming of the Messiah is announced in “seventy weeks.”

According to the Gospel of Luke, the archangel Gabriel appeared in the temple to the righteous Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist. The archangel announced the birth of Zachariah’s son, saying,

Zachariah expressed distrust to the archangel, and for this Gabriel punished him with inability to speak.

Gabriel is considered an archangel, that is, the commander of the angelic heavenly forces. In the Jewish tradition, the archangel plays the role of the angel of death. He comes as a messenger of the “supreme court” for the righteous with a perfectly straight knife in his hands and with it takes away the souls of the righteous.

The figure of the archangel in the icon is large, filling the entire space, but at the same time it looks light, almost weightless. This effect is achieved through an exquisite painting technique with thin, somewhat geometrized lines.

in the icon, the spirituality of the image is combined with softness, lyricism and poetry. The color of the icon is delicate and transparent. According to the tradition adopted in ancient iconography, the wings of the angel are depicted in dark brown, not white, as in Western European painting. The image of the heavenly messenger is endowed with a quiet contemplative expression. The image of the Evangelist of God belongs to the brush of an artist of the Moscow icon painting school of Andrey Rublev. The icon came to the museum’s collection in 1933 from the Voronezh Regional Museum of Local Lore.