About the work
A History of Faith
in Paint and Prayer
This icon depicts Saints Zosima and Savvaty of Solovki, with scenes from their lives. Created in the Orthodox tradition, it brings together hagiography, place, monastic memory and prayer in a single visual narrative.
The icon is located on Solovki, in the church of the skete on Zayatsky Island. The work therefore belongs not only to a studio history, but also to a living sacred place whose landscape and monastic tradition remain inseparable from the image.
The life scenes
The Border Scenes
The hagiographic border scenes unfold the saints’ lives around the central image. They evoke the journeys and encounters through which the Solovetsky monastic tradition took shape: withdrawal into the northern landscape, prayer, the founding and ordering of monastic life, the building of sacred places, spiritual guidance, repose and the continuing veneration of the saints.
Rather than functioning as isolated illustrations, the border scenes form a continuous hagiographic cycle. The centre presents the saints as intercessors, while the surrounding episodes place that holiness in time, geography and lived monastic experience. A later annotated version can identify each individual episode against the Life of the saints and the inscriptions preserved on the icon.
“The saints show us that a place can become a prayer,
and a prayer can change the world.”