On Saturday, March 8, Dr. Justin Willson presented “Style and Model in Early Russian Icons” as a part of the Russian History Museum’s Second Saturday online lecture series.

Icons in early modern Muscovy elicited a variety of responses from viewers. While often defined just in theological terms, icons were valued for their style and virtuosity.

Justin Willson from the Icon Museum and Research Center offers an in-depth exploration of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Russian icons from artistic, historical, and even political perspectives.

About the Speaker

Justin Willson is Curator at The Icon Museum and Study Center in Clinton, Massachusetts. His exhibition, "Printing Icons: Modern Process, Medieval Image" (October 17, 2024–March 30, 2025) examines how print transformed the creation and reception of Byzantine images across Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia over the 17th–19th centuries. His research focuses on concepts of the work of art in later Byzantium and the early Slavic world.

His first book, The Moods of Early Russian Art, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026, investigates how style, iconography and the function of sacred images changed over the 14th to 16th centuries in Muscovy. He is editing volume 4 in the series Sources in Byzantine Art History, entitled: The Visual Culture of Late Byzantium and the Early Modern Orthodox World, c.1350–c.1669 (under contract with Cambridge University Press). He received his PhD in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University in 2021 and was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History Leadership at the Cleveland Museum of Art / Case Western Reserve University for 2022–24.