Twentieth Century Developments in European Icon Painting

At the beginning of the 20^th century in both Greece and Russian Diaspora (mainly in Paris and Prague) a renewal of iconography that was supposed to be of Byzantine persuasion took place. That happened in parallel with the continuance of traditional icon-writing. For instance, while Photius Kontoglou urged icon-painters to go back to the roots of their art, and in Prague a group worked in the “usual” Russian style, Joanna Reitlinger in Paris adopted a radically different manner of painting. A similar situation existed in Russia in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries and in Romania in the nineteenth.