45. Icon on glass, "The Sorrowful Mother of God", workshop from Scheii Brasovului, last decades of the 19th century, rare piece, from the collection of the lawyer Constantin Vișinescu

Dimensions

width 55 cm, height 62 cm

Description

tempera and gold foil on glaze, stained frame, with forceps

PROVENANCE

Constantin Vișinescu was born in 1920 in Constanţa. Between 1930-1937 he attended the courses of the "Gheorghe Lazăr" College in Bucharest, and in 1938 he was admitted to two faculties: Law, Letters and Philosophy. At the end of 1940 he was sent to the Eastern Front against the USSR, where he participated in the combat for the liberation of Bessarabia. In 1943 he was injured and declared a war invalid. Ignoring this situation, he continued to fight on the front. In 1944 he fell prisoner and was sent to the Wosnesensk camp on the Bug, from where, along with three other comrades, he escaped and arrived home where he was arrested by the Soviet occupation troops, for desertion. However, the military prosecutor's office found that there was no legal basis for his prosecution and he was released. As a trainee lawyer he worked in the office of Istrate Micescu and then in the office of Ion Valjan. In 1951, being the defense lawyer in the trial of the Zionists in Bucharest, he was arrested by the Security of the regime. After a long investigation, he was sent to the labor camp at the Danube-Black Sea Canal, from where he was released in 1954. After release he resumed his legal work and in 1972 he received from the government of the Federal Republic of Germany the decoration "Das Verdist Kreuz" for judicial merits. In 1990 he founded the Romania-Israel Cultural Friendship Association. In 1996, the Presidency of Romania awarded him "The Commemorative Cross of the Second World War" for military services rendered to the Romanian state.