In Transylvania, Romanian icon painters are known from as early as the seventeenth century, many of them village priests, monks, or cantors. Among them, particular renown was gained by the priest Luca of Iclod, by then already a Greek Catholic, whose icon painted on wood was said to have been seen weeping in 1699 by an Austrian soldier who happened to be there: the figure of the Virgin Mary appeared to shed tears. The event made the icon so famous that the Greek Catholic wooden church at Nicula, where it was kept, became a place of pilgrimage. The icon’s reputation for working miracles, the great pilgrimages it attracted to Nicula, and the example set by an icon-painting monk at the small monastery established there all contributed to icon-making developing – first at Iclod, then at Nicula and Hășdate, three neighbouring villages – into a craft pursued on an increasingly large scale and capable of providing a livelihood for a growing number of people.

The pilgrims who flocked there readily bought any keepsake associated with the icon of the Virgin. Foremost among these were the icons made locally, particularly if they had first been touched against the “miraculous” image and were thus themselves believed to have acquired magical power. Demand became so widespread that, in order to meet it, it was perhaps the same monk who painted icons on wood who introduced the reverse-glass painting technique. In the village wooden church—before it burned down—it was still possible to see early examples of such icons on glass, dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were still small in size, carefully drawn and meticulously painted, with flawless inscriptions in Cyrillic characters, and could easily be distinguished from the later peasant-made pieces produced rapidly and serially.

The essence of the technique was to place a sheet of glass over an izvod, a line-drawn pattern or template prepared for the purpose, and to copy the image onto the glass. Since the painted surface faced inward, towards the back, when the glass was mounted in its frame, the image seen from the front became the mirror image of the original pattern. The makers of the older izvoade therefore allowed for this reversal, writing inscriptions and letters backwards, from right to left. In specialist English, the technique is conventionally termed reverse painting on glass or reverse-glass painting, while Romanian scholarship retains izvod for the traditional pattern used by the icon painter.

At Nicula, eight peasant families were named who, during the first third of the twentieth century, still made icons on glass as their principal occupation. In addition, several better-off farmers also took up the work during the winter months. Within the family workshop, icon production proceeded in series, with an almost assembly-line division of labour. Using a single pattern, several hundred copies might be painted in succession on thin sheets of glass, cut into vertical or horizontal rectangular formats ranging from approximately 15 to 35 centimetres.

One member of the family did nothing but draw the outlines and write the inscriptions with a fine brush, usually in black and only rarely in white. Another applied the background, while others filled in the garments, faces and hands in olive green, brick red, white, yellow and pink, each person working with only one colour at a time. The final stage was the application of gold leaf to the haloes. The use of patterns, reverse painting, fine brushwork and gold leaf is likewise documented in museum and scholarly descriptions of Transylvanian glass-icon production.

The already strong, saturated colours gained still greater intensity when seen through the glass. Yet in the small, dark, smoke-filled cottages of their peasant owners, with their tiny windows, these gleaming glass icons in bold colours must undoubtedly have made a striking impression. Hung side by side above the window on the principal wall opposite the entrance, the reverse-painted icons fulfilled much the same decorative role in the Greek Catholic Romanian homes of the Transylvanian Plain as the rows of painted, glazed plates and jugs displayed on the shelf-rack above the window in the houses of their Hungarian Reformed neighbours.

Whatever the glass-icon sellers failed to dispose of at the two local pilgrimages was packed into double saddlebags and carried, either on foot or on donkey-back, through the villages of the Transylvanian Plain and the Someș Plateau, and farther afield throughout Transylvania; some of the vendors even crossed the Carpathians into Moldavia.

Károly Kós, Workshops of Folk Icon-Making in the Transylvanian Plain (1994)