The Museum continues restoration of the painted décor in the Catherine Palace Chapel. Our art restorers have begun reconstruction of 64 wall icons in gilded carved frames.

Those icons on canvases were cut out during the Nazi occupation of Tsarskoe Selo in 1941, with nothing but 17 fragments left. Only four mid-18th-century icons of the Chapel survived: John of Damascus of 1749 by Ivan Argunov, The Healing of the Paralytic of 1753 by Gavril Deryabin, Archangel Michael and Archangel Gabriel of 1753 by Mina Kolokolnikov.

Most of the icons under reconstruction were painted by Mina and Fedot Kolokolnikov, the remarkable talents from a dynasty of serf artists from Tver Region. Their paintings for St Petersburg’s St Nicholas Naval Cathedral of the Epiphany, where the brothers came to work in 1755 right after Tsarskoe Selo, now serve as the reconstruction sources.

The cathedral icons by the Kolokolnikovs show a combination of Moscow icon-painting traditions and European tendencies that came to Russia in the 18th century.

The restorers have studied the icons in St Nicholas Naval Cathedral and chose the following ones to be the sources for reconstruction of the lost icons at Tsarskoe Selo:

• Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker
• Hieromartyr Iannuarius and Great martyr Catherine
• Hieromartyrs Clement of Rome and Peter of Alexandria (by Fedot Kolokolnikov)
• Metropolitans Peter, Jonah, Alexei and Philip of Moscow
• Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker
• Saint Vladimir the Great
• Saint Alexander Nevsky (by Mina Kolokolnikov)

All of those saints and patriarchs were depicted in the Chapel of the Catherine Palace.