13 May – 30 August 2026
The first temporary exhibition at the Icon Museum since its reopening honored the museum’s nearly 30-year collaboration with the Bode-Museum in Berlin (Sculpture Collection and Museum of Byzantine Art). Set amidst the permanent exhibition, it presented selected icons from the post-Byzantine era from the Bode-Museum’s collection, which have been on permanent loan to the Icon Museum in Frankfurt am Main since 1999. The exquisitely crafted, predominantly small-format icons of the Mother of God, the life and passion of Jesus Christ, and selected saints – which were intended for private worship – entered into dialogue with the permanently exhibited icons in the exhibition space, many of which originate from ecclesiastical contexts.
As portable media for communicating with the divine, icons are indispensable to the religious practice of Orthodox Christians worldwide. Yet these artistic depictions of saints and their stories, rendered in gold, rich tempera colours and distinctive painting conventions, also hold a special fascination for dealers, collectors, art lovers and museum directors. In the 19th century, European travelers discovered Italo-Byzantine, Greek, Russian and Coptic icons as valuable artefacts for their collections and museums. Especially very old icons – which bore witness to the outstanding craftsmanship in Russia, Greece, Italy, the Balkans, as well as Syria and Egypt – were particularly desired.
The icons from these regions in the Berlin collection, assembled since 1821 and dating from the 15th to the 18th century, have traveled particularly long and eventful journeys. The exhibition focused on these journeys of the icons, which can also be traced visually on their backs, usually hidden from view. Thus, the icons bear witness to religious practice in the form of dedications as well as to the complex paths they took from their place of manufacture, their acquisition, and their movement between storage facilities and exhibition venues.
The exhibition offered the opportunity to see these particularly precious sacred artworks once more in Frankfurt before they embarked on their next journey: A research project in Berlin aims to fill gaps in our knowledge of their history and uncover new information about their true age, hidden layers of paint, and unknown paths of their provenance, acquisition and ownership.
Curator: Konstanze Runge