Kollektsiia paskhal'nykh iaits iz sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo muzeiia istorii religii (Easter Eggs from the State Museum of the History of Religion)
St. Petersburg: Muzei istorii religii, 2013. pb. In the Orthodox celebration of Easter painted eggs were presented as the giver spoke the Easter greeting, “Christ is risen.” Going back in Russia at least to the seventeenth century, when tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich presented his boyars and close associates with painted eggs, most of the pieces in the Museum of the History of Religion date to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paschal eggs then were made of wood, papier mâché, porcelain, or glass and decorated with painted images of saints or still-life paintings of flowers and vernal motifs. As miniature paintings they were related to fine arts. Often worn on ribbons, the eggs were also a branch of decorative arts, a form of seasonal jewelry. The ritual of presenting gift eggs at Easter became prominent in the last years of Nicholas II’s reign; the emperor and empress had a large number of eggs made as gifts for officers and soldiers coming back wounded from the front in 1915 and 1916. The Museum of the History of Religions collection has works from factories and individual craftsmen. 72 pp., 23 cm, 63 b-&-w illus., 116 color, Rus. and ENGLISH. Item #1175
Price: $49.00