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Thread: ten icons?
#3
I would think a minimum would be an icon of Christ (not necessarily Sinai Christ - to me, the most sublime icons of Christ would be the 13thC icon from the Chilandar Monastery, and the mid-16thC Christ of the Deesis series of the Dionysiou Monastery. But this is personal preference.), an icon of the Mother of God, and of one’s patron saint as a bare minimum. Over and above that, it’s completely up to you. By all means, having icons of saints to whom you feel closest to, or have been most inspired by, is a good idea. There are no hard and fast rules as to which icons one SHOULD have.
And, contrary to the views of some pontificating iconographers, a mass-produced, printed mounted icon is no less worthy or holy than one hand-painted using egg-tempera. One only needs to consider the story behind the myrrh-streaming icon of St Nicholas, which I had the great privilege of seeing and venerating a few years ago. A wonderful example of “the stone that the builders rejected ...”, proof that God’s grace can show itself through a humble mounted icon, as much as in an egg-tempera masterpiece such as Vladimirskaya, Kursk-Root, or the Holy Trinity painted by Andrei Rublyev.
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