In April 1884 Vrubel left the Academy and looked up the offer of the well-known art critic A. Prakhov to go to Kiev and help restore the ancient murals of St.Cyril's Church. Vrubel restored 150 fragments of frescos and produced four new compositions where the originals were lost. Apart from the frescos he also painted four icons. On these he worked in Venice, where he went to study early Renaissance art. The best of the icons— The Virgin and Child (1885, State Museum of Russian Art, Kiev)—is a tender but sad womanly image of a mother who has a presentiment of her son's tragic fate.

Vrubel used this experience to search for greater spirituality, monumentality, and plastic expressiveness through classic art. His technique and style evolved fully in 1890. It is characterized by "volume cut into a multitude of interrelated, intersecting facets and planes; broad mosaic brush strokes to model form; and fiery and emotional color combinations reminiscent of stained glass."

The finest achievement of Vrubel's Kiev period, however, was his water-colour studies for murals in St. Vladimir's Cathedral (1887, State Museum of Russian Art, Kiev). By working in St. Cyril's Church and studying the frescos of St. Sophia's Cathedral, the artist came to understand the essence of the great monumental art of ancient Rus, and the Vladimir studies clearly show the link between Vrubel's work and the ancient heritage, which suited both his talent and his frame of mind. They include the noble Resurrection, the radiant Angel with Censer and Candle, and, finally, the shattering tragic Mourning. In this last work, Mary stands with wide tearful eyes, overwhelmed by suffering, over her son's grave. The extent of her sorrow is brought out by the solemn rhythm of the folds in her clothes, by the severe lines, the simplicity of the colour relations and the laconic composition. In Mourning—an altogether unique work in world art—Vrubel successfully brought together the harmony and monumental stature of early art, and an expression of the feelings of contemporary man.

Vrubel did not manage to turn these studies into actual murals; his part in the decoration of the Cathedral was limited to producing some fanciful ornaments, but this too he did with great enthusiasm and imagination. In the words of the artist Nesterov, Vrubel was 'innocently absent from our planet, wrapped up in his visions; and these visions, when they visited him, were not his guests for long, but gave place to new dreams and new images, hitherto unheard of, unexpected and unconjectured - the wonderful fantasies of a marvellous artist from another world'.

Religious subjects occupy a special place in Vrubel’s work. His path as an artist is symbolically framed by two angels. The first is the archangel Gabriel, fair and radiant, a herald of good news. Vrubel painted him on a pillar of St. Cyril’s Church in Kiev, and the angel marks the artist’s entrance to his profession. Azrael, the brooding angel of death with smoldering eyes from the Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel, Vrubel’s final work, is the last in the artist’s host of images from another world.

Artists have always needed to possess special qualities to depict supernatural beings spiritual strength, inner purity, a faith in their calling. Aesthetic perfection was not a priority in the execution of these images, for beauty was seen as an outcome of the artist’s sincerity and professional mastery, proof that he had been chosen by God to work with these themes.

The 1890s were characterized by the search for an aesthetic ideal in art, and Vrubel, with his pursuit of perfection in form and finely honed professional technique, perfectly fit the aesthetic demands of his age. The artist believed that Aufschwung, spiritual urgency, or stress, as the artist translated this word himself, was an integral part of an authentic work of art. As for faith, nothing is a better testament to the strength of the artist’s belief and his piety than his letters and memoirs of his loved ones.

Excerpts from Vrubel’s letters to his sister Anna eloquently attest to his absolutely sober awareness of the ramifications of painting pictures on religious subjects: «The public, which I love, wants to see Christ more than anything. I must give Him to the public as my strengths allow, with all my strength. Hence the calm necessary to direct all my efforts to making the illusion of Christ as beautiful as possible, i.e. I must work on my technique…» «I draw and paint Christ with all my strength, yet perhaps because I am so far from my family all the religious rituals, including Easter, annoy me, they are so alien.»

In her memoirs about her brother, Anna Vrubel wrote: «… His attitude to religion was such that, when speaking about whatever work absorbed him at the time, he said: ‘Art is our religion, yet … who knows, perhaps we will have to be humble.’» The lack of authentic or even feigned piety for a «higher mission» in the artist’s words about depicting the sacred history was not unusual at that time, an age of doubt and spiritual struggle, and did not seem blasphemous to Stepan Yaremich, one of the artist’s first biographers. To the contrary, he noted with satisfaction: «Here is the true great artistic thought, alien to useless and inexpressive words about the eternal and the ideal. Vrubel’s mind is crystal clear and free of the garbage of modern scholastic concepts.»

Vrubel’s words to Yaremich in 1901 before starting work on The Lamentation for St. Cyril’s Church in Kiev are colored with a completely different intonation: «This, essentially, is why I had to return.» Finally in 1906, in a conversation with Valery Briusov, whose portrait he painted when he was severely ill and already going blind, the artist confessed: «…I was not worthy to paint the Virgin and Christ.» The severity of the sentence the artist gave himself seems excessive, if we remember the power radiated by the wide eyes of the Virgin in the icon of the St. Cyril’s church, one of the most poignant images in art history.

The eyes of saints in ancient Sinai icons and Byzantine mosaics are also open wide, but the power of the gaze of the faces painted on them is void of emotional color. In Vrubel’s works the eyes of the prophets and angels smolder with the fire of feeling, such is the castigator of mankind’s sins, the prophet Moses, whose eyes that burn with righteous anger from the mural on the choir loft of St. Cyril’s Church. The smoldering gazes of other prophets painted by the artist convey an incredible spiritual energy necessary to carry out the mission given to them from above. Their physically powerful bodies are also brim with energy.

Vrubel was probably attracted by the possibility of using religious stories to communicate the most important human emotions in their most powerful expression, at the moment of a tragic twist of fate. With the maximum amount of energy (Aufschwung) he dared to express the entire spectrum of human feeling from the ecstasy of understanding the perfection of the Creator to the mystic horror induced by the immensity and endless variety of the Cosmos; from the joy of making to the fear of the unknown, as in the mural The Descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles on the dome of St. Cyril’s church.

The extreme expressions of sorrow in sketches of murals for St. Vladimir’s cathedral in Kiev are truly incompatible with Christian humility in the face of loss. Mourning for the lost, the anguish that comes with understanding the irretrievability of the lost these human feelings are just as natural as the triumph of the spirit over the flesh or the joy of achievement. As they replace each other, these feelings in moments of the greatest tension shape the soul and ignite the spirit. Any attempt to restrain feeling is doomed to failure. Perhaps that is the source of the hopelessness that emanates from the suffering The Virgin and Child, from the aloof and fleshless beautiful Angel with the incense-burner and candle, from Christ frozen in the torment of resurrection, provokes spiritual protest.

The tragic concentration of passions in the artist’s sketches for murals in St. Vladimir’s Church were apparently too much for the directors of the church’s construction, headed by professor Adrian Prakhov. As a consequence, the artist was only permitted to paint ornamentation. The artist’s tragic view of the world may have overpowered the strength of his spirit. However, there were other moments in his life colored by the most sublime of human feelings love. And it is the strength of all-encompassing love that permeates the image of the Virgin on the icon of St. Cyril’s Church, and makes this image so touchingly feminine and yet fearless. Her appeal and charm lies in the courage with which she accepts the call of fate. Here the artist seems to enter the age-old struggle with time, attempting to restrain the march of time before it carries away unique and precious moments, to capture beauty before it slips away.

This noble and impossible task led to the creation of a formally perfect and poetic work. And if the artist’s sober mind inspired him to create aesthetically perfect images, then his vibrant, accepting personality invariably shifted the accent to problems of ethics, endowing his images with the warmth of human feeling.