Gates of Mystery will enable Westerners to experience something of much more than the pleasure of admiring visual beauty. By contemplating the legacy of a great medieval artistic tradition, at least a part of the perfect harmony to which Russian artists and patrons aspired can be recovered. The Russian artistic tradition - springing from Byzantine roots - is here portrayed in its fullness, spanning the whole of the medieval Russian period, from the appearance of a definable Christian state in the eleventh century until the reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century swept away traditions that by then seemed timeless. Although the main concentration is on religious art - and particularly that of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - the wide range is shown here in over 100 full-colour plates, including some of the greatest works of the period. With extended essays on both the historical background and on particular strands of Russian art (such as embroidery and icon painting), Gates of Mystery is an ideal introduction to a tradition almost unknown in the modern West.