The enigma of the interior painting of the Church of St. George from the Suruceni Monastery

Abstract

The first stone church of the Suruceni Monastery founded in 1785 was built in 1825-1828 and dedicated to St. George. For decades this church was adorned by some icons. Although it is believed to have been painted by the Russian iconographer Pavel Piscariov (1875-1949), who began his artistic career in Bessarabia after 1906, according to some unpublished documents, the church was painted on the inside around 1890-1891. As the model for the unknown painter served the iconographic program of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Iasi, created in 1884-1887 by the famous Roman church painter Gheorghe Tattarescu (1818-1894), who tried to renew the church art in Romania, based on the great Renaissance style and the Italian Academism of the XVI-XVII centuries, by combining it with the Roman and Venetian Baroque and with the Realism of his contemporaries in Italy where he studied. We admit that such a modern realistic style of painting the holy places in Bessarabia was used for the first time in the Church of St. George in Suruceni and later was followed after 1906 by other painters trained this time in Russian schools. The Suruceni church painting was restored in 1942, but after the monastery was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1959 and it was largely destroyed, leaving only sections of the church’s domes, which were also substantially restored after the reopening in 1991. Following the major reconstruction of the church, this part of the old painting (1890-1891) was lost irretrievably.