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Royal icon, measure icon, princely icon, birth icon — this icon has been known by many names. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a measure icon was commissioned by relatives of a child born into the royal family, most often the godparents, for the sacrament of baptism. The tradition existed exclusively within the royal family. The making of such icons was entrusted to the finest state painters and jewellers: the masters of the Kremlin Armoury. The icon was painted on a cypress panel and adorned with precious metal revetments and gemstones. In 2023, we acquired this icon as an eighteenth-century work. Following research and the discovery of information identifying it as a royal icon, we are now presenting it on our website.
T. Samoilova, Candidate of Sciences and a scholar who has studied the subject of royal measure icons, concluded that the tradition of creating such icons began with the sacralisation — the divinisation — of royal authority under Ivan IV the Terrible. Measure icons recorded the height of the infant, the royal heir, “as a certain sacred offering” from the royal dynasty. The very concept of the measure icon had a symbolic connection, readily legible to contemporaries, with the measures of the Holy Sepulchre; such associative links helped establish its status as a relic of the royal line.
Eleven royal measure icons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have survived to the present day: eight are held in the Moscow Kremlin Museums — three of them icons of the Rurikids and five of the Romanovs — two are in the Novodevichy Convent, and one is in the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius. The icon discovered here is the twelfth. The image was created on the occasion of the birth, on 21 March 1689, of Tsarevna Maria Ivanovna, the first daughter of Tsar Ivan Alekseevich and Tsaritsa Praskovia Fyodorovna Saltykova. The child was named in honour of her grandmother, Maria Ilyinichna Miloslavskaya. From the dimensions of the measure icon, we know that the girl was born 44 cm tall, with a shoulder width of 17 cm. The infant’s baptism took place on 25 March 1689 in the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin; the sacrament was performed by Patriarch Joachim. Her godparents were the young Peter I and the tsar’s sister, Tatyana Mikhailovna. It was most likely they who commissioned the measure icon for their goddaughter. The tsarevna died three years later and was buried in the cathedral of the Ascension Convent. Her measure icon remained with her mother, Tsaritsa Praskovia Fyodorovna. Judging by the fact that, many years later, the tsaritsa commissioned a revetment for this icon, she deeply missed her little daughter, who had been her firstborn.
The painting was undoubtedly entrusted to the finest artists of the Armoury; at that time, this was Tikhon Filatyev. The style is unquestionably his. After Peter the Great’s reforms, the tradition came to an end, apart from a few isolated instances of measure icons being created. This measure icon is therefore an exceptionally important work of early Russian art, and its discovery is of enormous historical significance. It is likewise difficult to imagine a more substantial object for a private collection than this one.
