A multi-field icon, Menologium

The menologium is a liturgical book used in Eastern Christianity. It contains the lives of the saints, apocryphal stories or homilies for each day of the year in the sequence corresponding to the liturgical year calendar. The Menaion is a book presenting the order of celebration of the immovable feasts of the annual liturgical calendar. In those books, a particular feast or commemoration of a saint was complemented by a corresponding illustration. In individual volumes, they were sometimes placed on the same page placed at the beginning of the book. The illustrations were inspired the monumental paintings complementing the liturgical programme of the church. After the liturgical feast calendar was reordered following the end of the iconoclasm period, when icon painting flourished again, paintings meant for home worship emerged illustrating the liturgical calendar through figures of saints or illustrating the feasts in a strip pattern. They were also called menoliogions. The most comprehensive of these illustrate the entire liturgical year. Smaller icons represent individual months or periods of the liturgical year. Popular ones include menologions with images of the twelve most important feasts of the liturgical year with the central icon of the Resurrection of Christ (descent into the abyss). In Russian Orthodox Church since 18th century, menologions often featured images of the most important, particularly venerated icons of the Mother of God, such as the exhibited one. 

Teresa Bagińska-Żurawska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9243-3967