The Louvre Museum will inaugurate a new department dedicated to Eastern Christian art in 2027, the museum’s director, Laurence des Cars, announced during a visit to Athens last week.
The museum’s ninth department will showcase nearly 20,000 Byzantine art objects of great religious and social significance and introduce visitors to the complexity of Byzantine civilization.
The department will be curated by Maximilien Durand, who stated that the permanent exhibition will include objects dating from the 3rd century AD to 1923, the year the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, which led to the international recognition of Turkey’s sovereignty.
The exhibition will cover regions such as Ethiopia, Russia, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, the Balkans, and the Middle East. In addition to chronological and geographical aspects, the role of icons for Eastern Christians will be highlighted, exploring how the veneration of icons developed and shaped the cultures of the region.
Furthermore, the director of the Louvre, an art historian, added that cultural exchanges between Greece and France will continue, as they did in 2021 for the bicentennial of Greece’s War of Independence.
Photo: Public domain / Byzantine painting, discovered in 1164, in Nezeri, North Macedonia
