Published by The New York Times, October 16, 2005 Russia Peels the Veils From Antiquity and Gazes, Awed

With every new discovery as he cleaned the surface in his restoration studio, Aleksei Khetagurov grew more enthralled. He had never been so taken with an icon.

"Look at her, what a beauty," he told a visitor, hovering over the face of the Virgin in its gold encasement. "Look at her gaze. She is smiling, yes? It's a marvelous expression."

She had arrived in his studio as a small, blackened board, slightly warped as many Russian Orthodox icons are, hidden behind her forbidding veil of spoiled dark patina.

"At first I had no idea what was there," said Mr. Khetagurov, the chief of the icon restoration studio for the State Historical Museum.

He showed a photograph of the icon as it had come to him, dark and murky as though the Virgin were huddling with her child against a storm. "What do you see?" he said. "You don't see anything. You only find out what is there when you uncover it."

There are thousands of mysteries like this in the warehouses of the Historical Museum and throughout Russia, treasures that will enhance what is known about one of the world's great religious art forms.

"Who knows what may be in the warehouses?" Mr. Khetagurov said. "There can be surprises anywhere. It's as if suddenly you find a Titian."

Since the fall of atheistic Communism in 1991, the painting and restoring of icons has flourished again in Russia, and old icons that had been hidden or neglected have accumulated in need of restoration.

"Now, everywhere," said Ksenia Pokrovsky, a Russian iconographer who now lives near Boston - "everywhere, in all Russian towns and cities, there are both restorers and iconographers. Thousands of them. It is like a new spring."

Sometimes the restorers rediscover forgotten creations of great masters that have been obscured by the layer of boiled linseed oil that was used instead of varnish and that turns dark after 70 or 100 years.

Often the great icons have been painted over with as many as six layers of newer icons as the board is reused over the centuries. The layers are gently removed and can even be separately preserved if they are valuable.

Sometimes a completely unexpected, anonymous masterpiece is discovered beneath the grime and overpainting and joins the body of great Russian art.

This was the case with the delicate, late 17th-century Virgin that has so captured the heart of Mr. Khetagurov. Its subject is an unusual one, he said, formally known as "Icon of the Mother of God - the Mount Not Cut by Hands. "

The work is filled with complex symbolism that he can only guess at, and the egg tempera brushwork is so light and transparent, as he describes it, that the scene seems to be floating - painted by clouds, in the phrase of the past.

"I consider this to be a great icon," Mr. Khetagurov said, "no worse than the Mona Lisa. Her eyes are smiling. The more you look at it the more you feel that. You can see the sweet light of joy."

He held out for comparison a photograph of the Mona Lisa. "With her you can't tell," he said. "You don't know what Leonardo meant. But here - look at what joy is coming from it."

The burst of restoration mirrors a similar period a century ago when icons were collected and repaired as part of what was known as the Russian renaissance.

Then came a period under Soviet rule reminiscent of the "iconoclasm" of eighth-century Byzantium, when thousands of icons were destroyed as part of a religious schism.

When tens of thousands of believers were killed, many churchmen died trying to hide and save icons.

"In Soviet times they burned thousands and thousands of icons," Ms. Pokrovsky said. "And what they have now is remnants. But still they have thousands."

There is a kind of contemporary schism over the true meaning of the icons as works of art or religious artifacts. It has led to debates and demonstrations over the question of whether their rightful home is in churches or museums.

For many people who work with icons, they are both. Some of the most sacred and artistically valuable icons are in churches under the protection of museums.

For Mr. Khetagurov, his beloved icon was "a gift of fate" and his work, in his studio in the great Novodevichy Monastery, has been both technical and spiritual.

"You have to feel the soul of the icon, understand it," he said. "If you don't feel it, you can spoil it. For a restorer to understand these things takes 10 or 20 years. Until then he's just an artisan."