The monk set at the gate, who meets whoever comes and blesses them in.
Benedict's Rule gives the gate of a monastery to one old monk. He should be wise enough to take a message and give an answer, and settled enough not to wander off. Whoever knocks, whether stranger, pilgrim or poor, he answers at once, and he answers with a blessing. He is the first face of the house, and the whole house is judged by him.
The Porter is that monk, set in gold. He stands full length and frontal, in the manner of the Athonite icons of the monastic saints. His habit is dark and his face long and spent with keeping watch. The right hand is raised in blessing and the left holds a small cross and a knotted prayer rope. Behind him there is nothing but burnished gold, which in an icon is not a background but light: the place he stands in is lit from within.
He carries no name. An icon is lettered with the saint it shows. This one is left blank, so the porter is whoever keeps your door.
He was made to stand in the threshold of Clausura, lit by one candle in a plaster niche, so that he is the first thing the house shows anyone who enters. At commission, his name can be lettered in: a patron saint, a family's own, or none.
Every panel follows the method the icon-painting workshops have kept for a thousand years. Nothing in it can be hurried, and much of the time is spent waiting for layers to dry.
Seasoned linden is cut with a shallow recessed field, the kovcheg, so that a raised border frames the image. Hardwood battens are let into the back to keep it flat for centuries.
Linen is glued across the face. Over it go ten or more coats of gesso, chalk bound in rabbit-skin glue, each dried and sanded until the surface is as smooth and white as ivory.
The figure is drawn, then incised into the gesso with a stylus so that the lines survive under the gold.
Red clay bole is laid under the gold. Then 23.75-karat leaf is floated on with water and burnished with an agate stone until it shines like metal. The halo is punched by hand, one dot at a time.
Egg tempera: earth pigments ground into egg yolk and laid in thin layers from dark to light, with the face last. The gold highlight lines on the habit, the assist, are drawn in with a single fine brush.
A coat of olifa, a linseed-oil varnish, seals the painting and warms the colour year by year. The gold is left unvarnished so that it keeps its light.
From a single painted original to a room built around it. Each is made to order.
Painted by hand in egg tempera, with water gilding in 23.75-karat gold on a gessoed linden panel. One of one.
The image in archival pigment on a gessoed panel. The ground and halo are then laid in 23.75-karat leaf by hand and burnished, so no two editions catch light alike. Signed and numbered.
The Panel, set into a niche of hand-troweled lime plaster built into your wall, with a basalt candle ledge and concealed warm light. For an entrance, a chapel or a stair landing.
The icon in motion: light moves over the gold, and he closes his eyes, opens them to you and blesses. It plays in a quiet loop on a portrait screen set into a hand-gilded frame.