Lobonţ Puşcas, Maria: Ceramica în colecţtia de etnografie a Muzeului Judeţean Satu Mare (Satu Mare, 2014)

Introduction

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schools are breaking over the centuries and highlight some creations from among the many icons preserved.

The collection of icons of the Satu Mare County Museum is rich in historical and ethnographic heritage of 408 of such creations. The first and most important quality between the icons is the underlying material of representations, the most common being wood and glass. The icons on wood are the most durable, with a long tradition in the Romanian Christian area. The real masterpieces of wood painting are the icons made initially for an iconostasis, which is the most visible and the most artistically representative in Eastern churches. Often, the royal icons, of considerable size, and other smaller representations meant for the upper registers of the iconostasis as well as the icons on wood keep the creative identity of some renowned regional artists, authors of real pictorial schools. Such icons are kept mainly in the history collection of the Satu Mare County Museum. Undoubtedly, such most important ensemble is the iconostasis of the Greek Catholic Church of Tarna Mare, fully preserved, whose oldest representations date from the end of the 17th century. The iconostasis is now ranked in the mobile cultural heritage of Romania, in the Thesaurus section.

Glass icons have an extremely varied origin and dating. As they are more mobile and often smaller, they quickly exceed the scope of worship inside the church and spread to the level of the individual and serve the family spirituality. The tradition of painting icons on glass is said to be born in the last decade of the 17th century, with the miracle performed by the icon of the Holy Virgn of Nicula who is said to have wept for 26 days. Believers began to come more and more at the pilgrimage place and all they wanted was a copy of the blessed Icon. No wonder, therefore, that the monastery of Nicula has become one of the most important centres of religious painting on glass in Transylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Glass painting requires a technique different from other underlying material. The artist makes a mirror sketch on the side of the glass that is the back of the icon, and then he paints the details, finally covers the painting with a protective lacquer and frames it. Thus, the glass screen protects the visible part of the icon.

The most valuable collection of icons on glass of the Satu Mare County Museum is preserved in the Ethnography section and has more than 100 such pictorial representations of the school of Nicula. Most of them date back to the nineteenth century and are exceptional achievements of a school that reached its full artistic adulthood.

The Mureş area and the eastern part of Transylvania are best represented by the glass icons of Iernuţeni, of which the Satu Mare County Museum holds a few copies. However, the fine representation and stylistic identity make these icons some of the most valuable icons selected for a catalogue.

In addition to these schools of painting, we must not ignore the many representations with unclear identity;