Icoana de la Nicula – o „reparare” inedită din anul 1934 sau... o necesară reparaţie morală şi istorică în an aniversar
The icon from Nicula – a unique “restoration” from 1934 or... a necessary moral and historical reparation in the anniversary year

Summary/Abstract: The Icon from Nicula, famous for over 300 years for the miraculous manifestation of its „weeping”, has since become the subject of controversial disputes about its authenticity, with its return from the castle of the Transylvanian governor Sigismund Kornis in Benediugu Dejului, today Manastirea village near Gherla.During the research carried out for the purpose of documenting the history of the miraculous manifestations of the wonder-working icons in Transylvania in the 17th and 20th centuries, precisely where we were certain that it would be a routine work, to confirm what was already known, we had the great and pleasant surprise of discovering some unpublished information about the Holy Icon of Nicula. These new elements, in relation to our previous knowledge about the Icon, constitute details hidden from the untrained eye, even from the eyes of researchers, who see them only as economic and statistical information. Instead, in the eyes of a researcher of a transdisciplinary nature, in this case of theology, art and history, these hidden details represent sources of the first order, completing and even rewriting parts of the icon’s history.The information discovered in some of the account books have become the most important confirmation of the working hypotheses concerning the interventions made on the pictorial layer of at least an important part of the surface of the Holy Icon, as stated by the researcher and museographer Dr. Ana Dumitran in her work The Weeping Virgins of Transylvania. The importance of that information have strengthened the conviction that the significance of these files in the scientific approach of historical research, as well as theological and artistic, proved to be more than providential, making them real sources of documentation for a part of our study. With this confirmation of the pictorial’s intervention, we also learned the name of the painter who did it, a certain Havas, whom our research has brought out of the anonymity into which he had sunk for more than three quarters of a century, rediscovering him as “the best Transylvanian portraitist” of the first half of the 20th century.On the other hand, the certification of this intervention, based on the discoveries that were made, also brings to the forefront the re-confirmation of the authenticity of the famous Icons, which was intended to be invalidated by a famous intervention in the press of the time, having the deacon Iosif E. Naghiu as author, but which in the light of new research, confirms exactly... the opposite! Another positive, yet unpublished, part of our research was the discovery made in the same accounting registers of the first indisputable public representation of the Holy Icon of Nicula, after its unveiling of the garment that hid it from the view of the faithful for more than two centuries, with its first photograph in 1930.

• Details
• Contents