According to the sources, the term “in Powers” was used in the titles of various Russian iconographies; the widespread and well-known one is: “The Saviour in Powers”. The origin and nature of this image are largely open to question. Its meaning has not been revealed: the word “Powers” can define either “angelic powers” or “divine creative power and might”. The article draws attention to the fact that every Russian icon with “in Powers” in its title has the same quadrangular pointed elements with the symbols of the evangelists. The author suggests that the term “Powers” is related not to the angels, as is commonly believed, but to these star-shaped figures. They are the most noticeable and characteristic details of “The Saviour in Powers” and other iconographies with similar star-shaped objects. And it is reasonable to assume that these iconographies, especially “The Saviour in Powers”, are named after them and not after comparatively small and hardly visible “transparent” angels. In the author’s view, the epithet “in Powers” was initially applied to the icon of the enthroned Savior in a star-shaped “radiance”, which was located in the center of the Deesis row. And here it meant “divine creative power”. Repeating in other icons, these (and similar to them) star-shaped figures should have been associated with the epithet “in Powers” and could add it to their titles. It is also possible that it was attributed to both angelic powers and star-shaped figures that would allow using “powers” in the plural form.

This article is based on a comparison of graphics of Russian deesis images of the 15th-16th centuries. A detailed analysis of a large number of tracings of Deesis icons that date from different times and places leads to the assumption that their authors widely used a set of the same graphic elements repeated from icon to icon regardless of who or what is depicted, the Savior or Theotokos, an angel, an apostle, a prophet, a martyr, a bishop or a saint; regardless of whether this image is half-length or full-length; regardless of the postures and gestures of the depicted figures and their attires. These patterns are especially noticeable in drawing robes, draperies and fabrics in general. The use of these typical elements is almost mandatory, although their combination varies from image to image. The same blocks of elements can also differ slightly from icon to icon in terms of proportions, relative sizes of particular images, and the curvature of the lines. A block can be partly concealed by an element not belonging to it or used twice; its part can be mirrored, rotated at some angle, clockwise or counterclockwise, shifted or removed, while the structure of the block remains the same. An experienced eye will easily identify each block in a wide variety of icon images. This phenomenon allows us to significantly modify the idea of the strategy medieval icon painters adopt, i.e. a Deesis icon drawing was not often literally copied, at the same time, it was not invented completely anew. To a greater or lesser extent, the images were constructed from already available ready-made blocks, and some of the figures consist of them almost entirely.

The article examines the origin of non-trivial images of the Evangelists’ symbols in the form of half-figures of anthropomorphic three-faced cherubim, which are known in Russian illuminated Gospels from 1560s through 1590s, on the silver covers of a small group of the early seventeenth-century Holy Table Gospels and in some iconographic works. The author finds the source of these images in a Slavonic translation of Anastasius of Sinai’s Against the Arian, which is included in the Izbornik of Svyatoslav, dated to 1073, the second-oldest surviving old Russian manuscript. In this work, Anastasius of Sinai echoes the opinion of Irenaeus of Lyon, who explained the fourfold number of the Gospels by linking it to the four faces of the cherubim, i.e., the faces of the four animals described in the Book of Ezekiel. These animals came to be perceived later as symbols of the Gospels and the Evangelists. In the old Slavonic translation, the cherub was called three-faced instead of four-faced due to an erroneous confusion of numerical values of the Glagolitic letters in the original of the Izbornik and Cyrillic characters in the 1073 manuscript. In Glagolitic the letter “Glagol” has the numerical value “four”, while in Cyrillic it is “three”. This error was not always corrected in the manuscript copies up to the 18th century, and it generated a limited iconographic tradition in Vologda and other regions of the Russian North as far as one can judge from the surviving works. This article deals with the full-page miniatures of three Russian Tetragospels from the State Historical Museum and the Russian National Library, three silver emblazoned Gospels from the Moscow Kremlin Museums, the Perm State Art Gallery and the Arkhangelsk Regional Museum. The text of Anastasius of Sinai’s Against the Arians is examined in fifteen copies from the 11th through the 18th century