The feast of the Virgin’s presentation, which falls on 21 November, is one of the five Marian ‘Great Feasts’. Its source is mainly the apocryphal Protevangelion Jacobi or Book of James datable to 145 AD.

The occasion depicted is a Christian adaptation of the ancient Jewish custom of presenting a male child to a priest at the temple soon after birth. The three-year-old Mary is presented by her parents Joachim and Anna into the temple where she is received by Zacharias the high priest. She was one of seven virgins each holding a candle and each set to spin skeins of wool of different colour. Mary was given the royal purple that would become the veil of the temple. Mary subsequently ascends a seven-stepped stairway on top of which she is ‘fed by angels’[1].

All the details in the icon come from the apocryphal tradition: we see Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna, on the lower left and five of the seven virgins holding tapers at the lower right. The priest Zacharias opens the gates to the Holy of Holies as the child Mary steps up to enter in. Above in the galleried balcony we see Mary communicating with an angel.

Our icon departs from the more traditional iconography which shows the seven stepped stairway and a curtained baldachin. The painter has used western architectural elements acquired from Venice via the Ionian Islands School. However the style and technique – dense red, blue and green colours, dark under panting of the faces and hands – point strongly to North-Western Greece or Albania.

[1] Sources: Kazhdan, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, Vol. III, OUP 1991; Lossky and Ouspensky The Meaning of Icons, Olten 1952; Paul Underwood, The Kariye Djami, vol, 3, Princeton, 1964.