The study traces the stages in the institutionalisation of education in Byzantine ecclesiastical painting in Romania, from the Holy Synod’s decision of 1889 regarding the preservation of the Byzantine style, through the 1926 Law for the Protection of Ancient Ecclesiastical Paintings and the establishment of a school for painters, to the establishment of the Higher School of Ecclesiastical Art in 1940 and the first academic specialisations after 1989, demonstrating that the initiative consistently lay with the Romanian Orthodox Church.