The Virgin and John the Baptist interceding on behalf of humanity at the Throne of Judgment from the period of the 13th century. However, the composition is older and examples are known from the 9th century when the meaning was not so much that of intercession but rather that of honouring Mary and John as the first witnesses of Christ’s divinity.

Mary’s scroll says ‘Master most gracious, Lord Jesus Christ, My Son and my God, incline your ear to me, for I pray for the world,’ a typical text associated with the Virgin in Deesis icons. The panel depicting Christ identifies him, in Church Slavonic, as Gospod Vserderzhitel or Lord Almighty. Christ holds an open gospel with an excerpt from Matthew 11:29-28: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek,’. John the Baptist is identified with the epiphet ‘креститель’ meaning Baptist. He is more usually named John the Forerunner ‘предтеча’ in Orthodoxy. He holds a chalice-shaped discos, or paten, in his left hand while his right-hand points to what it contains: the miniature figure of Christ as the Eucharistic symbol of the Lamb of God. The scroll that John the Baptist holds is the beginning of John 1:29 ‘Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world,’.

To understand the origin of objects such as this metal icon, one must turn to the reforms of Patriarch Nikon under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in the second half of the seventeenth century. These reforms led to a schism in the church. The Old Believers fled into rural Russia to continue their traditional forms of worship. There, they founded the monastery at Vyg where they began to produce metal icons on a large scale. The monastery was supressed during the reign of Emperor Nicholas I. Even with the suppression, the high-quality metalwork produced at the monastery inspired many replicas, especially in surviving centres of Old Believer crafts. The best quality enamel and bronze icons were made in Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century during a religious revival that gripped Russia. They often used models inspired by those of Vyg.