Back in 1972, when the esteemed art historian Michael Baxandall first laid out his revolutionary idea of the “period eye” in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, he pointed out how much of ourselves we bring to the historical art we see.
He deemed contemporary culture in Western Europe to be close enough to that of the Italian Renaissance for modern Western viewers not to misunderstand too much. “We are closer to the Quattrocento mind,” he wrote, “than to the Byzantine, for instance”.
Fifty years later, Byzantium and the art it produced are still misunderstood, when not unknown. It has only been a subject of serious study in the West for about a century. And still today, its treasures, with their lines converging on the spectator and their mystical insistence on the work of art as presence itself, sit at a distance from those of the Western canon.
The Musée du Louvre aims to bring these treasures closer to the public with a new department of Byzantine and Eastern Christian Art. Slated to open in 2027, it will occupy 3,000 sq. m of the Denon Wing, the museum’s most visited, adjoining Roman Antiquities and Islamic Art on the ground and mezzanine levels.
The scope of the department is startling. Its 20,000-plus works, currently scattered between the Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, Roman and decorative arts, among others, map out a huge geographical area, from Ethiopia, Mesopotamia and the Middle East to Greece, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Russia.
Substantial donation
The project, which required government approval, was announced in the Journal officiel, France’s official bulletin of legislative and regulatory texts, in October 2022. Making space for it in the museum requires philanthropical support, too. In early 2024, the Saadé family of French shipping and logistics magnates, the owners of the company CMA CGM, made a substantial donation. Maximilien Durand, the project director of the future department, says more donations will soon be announced.
The political has always been a fundamental component of the heritage question
The US design agency WHY and its Paris-based partner, BGC, have been announced co-winners of the competition to redesign the space. Kulapat Yantrasast, the founder of WHY, whose most recent plaudits include redesigning the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, says the aim is not to dictate a linear route for visitors to follow through the 20-30 rooms that the department will comprise. Rather, he aims to highlight the multiplicity of cultural worlds at play and give individual pieces context.
Eastern Christian art has been present in the Louvre’s holdings from its very beginnings as the Muséum Central des Arts de la République, when post-Revolutionary officials collated what they had confiscated from the crown and the church into a public collection in 1793.
An early precursor section, dedicated to Christian art, was opened in 1954 but closed not long after, in 1969. Before his departure in 2013, the former director of the Louvre, Henri Loyrette, tried to get a new department off the ground, but that was cancelled by his successor, Jean-Luc Martinez, on the grounds that there was no urgency: improving visitor access was the greater priority.
After being named to run the Louvre in 2021, Laurence des Cars revived the idea in one of the first interviews she gave. “It is a magnificent collection that deserves a department in its own right,” she told a national radio station, France Inter.
A 17th-century icon of the Crucifixion by Emmanuel Lambardos
© 2023 Musée du Louvre / Hervé Lewandowski
Durand highlights that the Louvre’s is a reference collection for medieval Byzantine ivories, gold and jewellery. It holds the biggest Coptic collection outside of Egypt. It is also one of the only museums outside Armenia where visitors can see a khachkar (an Armenian cross-stone): a 13th-century specimen whose significance, in the context of the ongoing erasure of ancient Armenian heritage in Azerbaijan, cannot be overstated.
Exciting acquisitions
The new Byzantine department is obliged by French heritage law to play a critical role in advice and expertise, particularly for the art market. Its remit covers Byzantine and Eastern art from the third century AD to 1923. It has already made several exciting acquisitions: a 16th-century Russian icon that was in the private collection of the Bavarian princely Oettingen-Wallerstein family; a 17th-century Cretan icon; an exceptional maquette of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem made by artisans in Bethlehem and given to Louis XIV; and a triptych made for the last Russian Emperor Nikolai II and the Empress Alexandra.
Durand says that even though conflicts in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh and the Middle East had not yet erupted when Des Cars brought the project back to life in 2021, the contemporary international context has been an important consideration from the outset.
“The political has always been a fundamental component of the heritage question,” he says, “in terms of what we preserve, what we study and what we show.” The department of Islamic Art was born in the wake of 9/11 and took over a decade to materialise. The Louvre, with its nine million annual visitors, has a responsibility, he says, “to explore all the complexities of the world”.