The exhibition presents a fragment of a fresco from the Church of the Resurrection in the town of Puchezh, painted by Yaroslavl artists in 1789. The date is marked on the eastern scuncheon of the northern entrance doors. The Puchezh paintings illustrated parables and reproduced the images of miracle-working icons. Painters commonly used engraved editions as models for frescoes.

The center of the large multi-figure composition placed on the northern wall was a sailing boat steered by Christ. At the top left Babylon was depicted, below — horsemen and wicked kings, on the right — the Heavenly Jerusalem, and below it to the right the Harlot of Babylon on a multi-headed beast with a cup in her hand. In the lower part of the composition on the shore, there are images of non-Christians and heretics aiming spears, hooks, and arrows at the ship (these parts, separated when removed from the walls, are also kept in the Andrei Rublev Museum).

The symbolism of the scene lies in its iconographic interpretation. The boat with a multitude of people is the “Ship of Faith”, understood as an image of the Church, a place of salvation in the sea of life. This image goes back to the Old Testament Noah’s Ark and the New Testament boat (fishing boat) of Peter the Apostle, in which Christ sailed with the apostles and tamed the storm, and from which He preached to the people standing on the shore.

Different variations of the “Ship of Faith” became widespread in the West, especially with the development of printing. In particular, in Nuremberg, the famous engraver Hans Weigel Senior published a large-format printed sheet in 1570–1577. It featured an image of a church in the form of a floating ship. It has much in common with the Puchezh composition: the arrangement of the boat, non-Christians, Heavenly Jerusalem, Christ holding the mast, apostles, non-Christian horsemen with spears, the Harlot of Babylon on a beast — and even explanatory inscriptions in rectangular inserts.

The plot could have entered Russia through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the publication of the 1666 book by Archbishop Lazar (Baranovich) of Chernigov, whose work “The Spiritual Sword” was published with such an image on its title page. Russian icon painters widely used the engravings of this edition. The image of a church-ship headed by Christ the helmsman was particularly widespread in cities with developed trade, for example in Yaroslavl, which occupied a prominent place in Russia’s trade relations with Europe and eastern countries.