Among the ancient Slavs, a woman leaving her hair loose was believed to invite evil spirits. There was only one exception: her wedding day. This painting captures that exact moment. Here's the info for the painting I'm sharing: Andrey Remnev, The Unplaiting of the Hair, 1997. Egg tempera and oil on canvas, 100x100 cm. Remnev was born in 1962 into a family of doctors in Yakhroma, near Moscow, Russia. He was one of the first students at the Surikov State Art Institute to write a thesis on a religious theme. Here's the ritual depicted in the painting: in ancient Russia, unmarried girls wore a single braid. On the eve of a wedding, this braid was ceremonially undone, re-braided into two, and hidden beneath a headdress. From that moment on, only her husband was allowed to see her hair. Being caught bareheaded was a crime as serious as adultery. The red ribbon resting in the young woman's lap is the 'krasota' ribbon, removed from her braid. In traditional wedding laments, the bride would 'release' this krasota (beauty) and volya (free will) to the fields, forests, and rivers. According to research by folklorist Philippa Rappoport, this meant the bride was returning her maidenhood to nature. For the Slavs, loose, unbound hair was always a sign of danger. The rusalka, a vengeful water spirit, was always depicted with flowing hair. If her hair dried out, she'd lose her powers. During the wedding ceremony, the moment the bride's hair was undone was considered when she was most vulnerable to magic. Just like the rusalka, the bride stood 'between two worlds.' Remnev painted this piece in his studio at the Spaso-Andronikov Monastery in Moscow - the exact place where the 15th-century master iconographer Andrei Rublev both worked and was buried. From 1994 to 2000, he studied icon techniques under the iconographer Father Vyacheslav Savinykh. He completed the painting in 12 stages: starting with an egg tempera sketch, moving through grisaille and color modeling, all the way to the final layer of oil paint. The golden-haloed archangels in the background belong to the Byzantine icon tradition. The young woman in the foreground, however, reflects 18th-century European portraiture. Remnev intentionally builds this duality: the sacred and the secular, the planar and the volumetric... In 2015, the Spanish fashion house Delpozo, and in 2018, the Italian brand Vivetta, built their collections on this visual language by Remnev.