Before the Gold Ground: Five Kyiv Icons and the Origins of the Sacred Image
The smallest exhibition at the Louvre this summer is also one of its most consequential. In Room 173 of the Denon wing, five icons from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts in Kyiv are on view under the title The Origins of the Sacred Image. It asks for a slower kind of looking, and rewards it.
The five panels belong to a group of sixteen works moved from Kyiv to Paris in secret since December 2022, in cooperation with the heritage-protection alliance ALIPH. The Khanenko's own building was struck by a missile last October, some forty meters from its walls; its collections had already been hidden and its rooms emptied. The works now in Paris are, in the plainest sense, refugees. The Louvre frames the show as an act of solidarity with Ukrainian museums — but presents the objects as what they are: among the most important survivals in the history of the Christian image.
Four are encaustic panels of the sixth and seventh centuries, pigment in hot wax, from Saint Catherine's Monastery at Sinai — one of the few sites where icons this old escaped iconoclasm. What strikes first is how classical they are: the modelling of the faces, the frank naturalism of the gaze, late-antique portraiture turned toward a new purpose. Not yet the flattened, hieratic figures of mature Byzantine art, but the moment a portrait tradition was being made to carry a presence.
The fifth belongs to another world, and for readers of later medieval panel painting it is the pivot of the room: a micro-mosaic icon of Saint Nicholas, made in Constantinople around 1300, set in a remarkable gold frame. Seen after the Sinai panels, it makes a five-hundred-year argument legible at a glance. Between those seventh-century faces and this shimmering Palaiologan surface, the sacred image acquired its signature material — gold, not as ornament but as the very ground of the holy. This is the maniera greca that would soon cross the Adriatic and reshape Italian painting. The Louvre does not spell the connection out. It does not need to; the lineage is in the objects.
The show heralds the Louvre's new Department of Byzantine and Eastern Christian Art, opening in 2027.
Press kit - Louvre: https://presse.louvre.fr/the-origins-of-the-sacred-image
