Mandylion icon and silver and cloisonné enamel oklad by Orest Kurlyukov, €420,000 (£362,000) at Hargesheimer.
Made less than two decades before the Revolution forced the Moscow jewellers to close, it was in the 1890s that the firm founded by Kurlyukov Orest Fedorovich (1845-1916) in 1884 was at its peak, often supplying cloisonné enamel work to both Ruckert and the Faberge’s workshops.
The icon tempera on wood panel icon it housed is a copy of the Mandylion of Edessa, the legendary relic that was said to bear the miraculous imprint of the face of Jesus Christ. However, of equal importance to its commercial fortunes was the large 13 x 12in (33 x 29cm) silver-gilt frame worked in the elaborate ‘old’ or ‘original’ Russian style. It is marked O Kurlyukov in Cyrillic alongside the Moscow assay mark for the period 1896-1908.
Kurlyukov made a speciality of these icons and sold them in a number of different sizes of which this was the largest and most complex. Another was offered by Sotheby’s in London in 2010 with an estimate of £200,000-300,000.
The market for the best Russian works of art has not been too negatively affected by sanctions. This piece, with some minor restoration, was guided at €80,000-€160,000 in Dusseldorf, Germany, but sold at a punchy €420,000 (£362,000).
