The Savior of the Unsleeping Eye (Greek „Christos Anapesson“) is a unique iconographic type depicting Christ as a youth, reclining diagonally on a bier with his eyes open, his head supported by his right hand. The Virgin Mary and an Angel stand before him, and above the bier is a flying angel with the instruments of the Passion: a cross, a spear, and a cane. A blooming garden is most often used as a background.
The Savior of the Unsleeping Eye is a symbolic type of Christ depiction, developed based on certain Old Testament prophecies in which Christ is compared to a lion (Genesis 49:8–9, Revelation 5:5, and others). Medieval natural science ascribed a number of fantastical properties to the lion (the reanimation of lion cubs by a lioness on the third day after birth, sleeping with open eyes, etc.), which in turn received a complex symbolic interpretation – they were seen as a prototype of the death and Resurrection of Christ. In particular, sleep with open eyes signifies human death, which cannot in any way reflect on God (“he fell asleep in the flesh, as if dead, and not in the Divinity” – 17th-century ABC book). All these ideas are reflected in the icon, which depicts the young Christ on a bed, the Mother of God bending over him, and angels with the instruments of the Passion (the instruments of the Passion reveal the true meaning of the sleep in which Christ is – it is the sleep of death). Finally, the image of the unsleeping Christ-Lion (Psalm 120:2–4) has a more specific meaning – God’s constant care for man. This scene appears in Byzantine and Old Russian art at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries.
Revelation of John (Apocalypse)
5:5 And one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the book and to loose its seven seals.”
Psalm
120:2 My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
120:3 He will not suffer your foot to be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber;
120:4 He will not slumber. and he who keeps Israel does not sleep.
