I know that I have been negligent in not introducing the iconographer team. But we've all been quite busy this week and slipping past one another from church to house to evening events. Here are some quick photos so you can identify them in the other shots.
Theodore
Alexander
Dmitry
This is the first Sunday that the liturgy was celebrated since the scaffolding went in. As you can see, it's definitely in the way. But things went smoothly with two chalices in front of each of the side aisles.
I took the opportunity to climb the scaffold again, and capture the status of the Pantocrator icon on the dome, with its gilded background.
Here's a photo of the altar and apse from the top of the scaffolding.
This is a good time to introduce the terms that have been or will be used to describe parts of this icon painting project. If you are not an architect or a historical building expert (I am not), then you can refer to the drawings below. On the left, you see an arch. If you lined up a bunch of arches in a row, you have a barrel vault. This is the general shape of St. Anthony's ceiling.
However, to complicate matters for the builders, the ceiling is interrupted with square shapes, as shown below.
If you were to take an arch and spin it on its vertical axis, the shape it creates is a "barrel and dome". The transition where the barrel and dome intersect the barrel vault room is called a pendentive. You can see pendentives in the photo above, behind the chandelier, and one is colored red in the image below.
Traditionally, icons of the four evangelists are painted on these curved surfaces on an Orthodox church ceiling. Here is an example of mosaic icons in St. George Serbian Orthodox Church, just a few miles away from us,
and an elaborate frescoed ceiling that we saw recently in Russia.
In the photo above, you can clearly see the dome, the drum with windows, and the penditives with an evangelist in each corner. Due to the shape of the pendentives in St. Anthony Church, they will be painting an evangelist and one of the 4 mystical beasts (which represent them) rather than wrap the portrait across the sharp inside line in each corner.
Here's how the dome is looking today:
There are many small details to finish in the next 48 hours.
Come back soon for more photos of St. Anthony Church.
