Koren Picture-Bible (1692–1696)

The Koren Picture-Bible is a printed part-bible including a series of 36 woodcuts with hand-colouring illustrating the books of Genesis and Revelation.

A.G Sakovich cites evidence that the artist or designer was Gury Nikitin Kineshemtsev, whose abbreviated name appears on several of the Apocalypse blocks.

Gury Nikitin Kineshemtsev was the premier fresco artist of Russia in the seventeenth century and head of the Kostroma Brotherhood of Painters until his death in 1691.

He also incorporated non-traditional elements from the Russian edition of the Short Palaea, which includes considerable apocryphal material.

He turned up in the tax rolls as a resident of Moscow's Мещанская Слобода or Tradesman's District, an independent craftsman of modest means.

The Koren Bible contains some uncanonical views, raising the question of its relationship to the Raskol or Schism in Russian Orthodoxy and the violent suppression of it in the 1670s-1690s.

Briusova, the premier scholar of 17th century Russian fresco art, assures us that Kineshemtsev and his colleagues and merchant patrons were deeply sympathetic to the rebels.

Adam and Eve are shown at their creation with halos, losing them only temporarily when they sin and are expelled from Eden, but regaining them when they repent.

Thus the moral responsibility for bringing evil into the world is displaced to Cain, who envied, hated and killed his brother Abel, and lied to God.

This does not fit with the moral stance of the Old Believers, whose leader, Protopop Avvakum, emphasized that, while the rest of creation is called into being "by the word" of God, Adam and Eve are made of clay.

And though the devil makes his bid for power, God casts him down into the abyss (Hell), which is represented by a cutaway space at the bottom corner of the picture, indicating a place beneath the surface of the earth.

There are other reasons not to associate the Koren Bible directly with the Old Believers or Schismatics, yet just publishing an Apocalypse at a time when masses of one's countrymen were awaiting the end of the world would seem to acknowledge or make some statement of solidarity with them.

The surviving copy has an ownership history in the 18th century in the Upper Volga region and includes persons of various classes—from peasant to nobility.