Icon in a shining framework in every house. Riza-covered (folezh) icons in Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries

Riza-covered or foil covered (“folezh”) icon with faces and hands painted according to a template decorated with a stamped metal frame became a symbol of the Russian icon painting crisis at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. According to the established scientific tradition their appearance was a response on the part of artisan icon painters to the distribution of cheap printed icons. The purpose of this article is to prove that the emergence of the riza-covered icons is not a process that could start “from below”, but they were spread by large factories (first of all, the icon factories of Vassily Krestyaninov). The author points out the reasons for the riza-covered images and also establishes an ideological connection between the “folezh” icon and the Byzantine and Old Russian icon decoration traditions.