Gregory the Iconographer

Venerable Gregory the Iconographer (the icon painter) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Monastery, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. He is commemorated, Old Style, on 8 August and on 28 September (in the synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves); there is another of the same name at the Caves, Gregory the Wonderworker. The time of his life is not known precisely: in the sources the year of his death is given as 1074 or 1105, but these have no foundation. The year 1105 in our record is therefore only a guess.

What is known

Gregory was an icon painter. Some authors count him a companion of Venerable Alypius, but nothing in the sources proves it. In the old commemoration book of the Caves Monastery (fifteenth century) five Gregorys are mentioned. He is first called an icon painter in the first edition of the Paterikon of the Caves (1661), which contains the plan of the Near Caves, with the place where the relics of Venerable Gregory lie. The "Description of the Russian Saints", known from copies of the end of the seventeenth century, counts him among the saints of Kiev. The "Tale of the Holy Icon Painters", written at the beginning of the eighteenth century, also tells something about him. Veneration in the whole Church began after the permission of the Holy Synod, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to place the names of a number of Kievan saints in the general calendars.

The painters' manual (end of the eighteenth century) prescribes that he be painted thus: a Russian, with a beard like that of Saint John Chrysostom, with a black klobuk on his head, looking backward, in monastic vestment, with the fingers of the right hand raised and the left pressed to the chest.