Icons

Within the Orthodox tradition an icon is not a picture but a window, painted according to fixed iconographic conventions handed down from workshop to workshop over centuries. Egg tempera on a prepared wooden panel, often with a levkas ground and gold leaf, forms the material basis of a visual language calibrated in Byzantium and later inflected in Greece, Russia, and the Balkans. This collection brings together panels that vary in origin and age, from hand-painted work after an old model to older and certified Byzantine pieces.