Ariel Agemian

Ariel Agemian, born Haroutin Pascale Agemian in Bursa in the Ottoman Empire in 1904, was an Armenian American painter who worked in Italy, France and New York City. He specialized in religious art, portraiture and mural painting, drawing on the Old Masters and the Italian Renaissance, and trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, where he won a gold medal in 1926. He survived the Armenian genocide, became a United States citizen in 1943, and is known for his 1935 painting Face of Christ, based on the Shroud of Turin, and for hundreds of illustrations he created for Catholic religious publications. Pope Pius XII knighted him into the Order of Saint Gregory the Great in 1958. He died in New York City on November 28, 1963. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/