Images de la spiritualité grecque. Icônes de la collection Rena Andreadis

Five centuries of Greek icons illustrated through a selection of masterpieces (some of them famous, others exhibited for the first time) from the Rena Andreadis collection, one of the world's most important private collections of Greek icons, part of which was donated to the Benaki museum in Athens.
The collection is remarkable for its quality, quantity and scientific importance; bringing together a selection of icons from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, the Andreadis collection covers a vast geographic area Constantinople, Magna Grecia, Crete, the Ionian Islands and continental Greece. The iconography is also particularly varied, the most widespread and renowned religious subjects can be seen side by side with some that are lesser known or typical of single areas or particular historical periods.


Curated by Anastasia Drandaki (conservator of the Byzantine collection at the Benaki Museum, Athens), this volume, published for the exposition in Geneva, analyses the evolution of this particular artistic genre: from the oldest works from the period of the Byzantine Imperial dynasty of the Paleologists (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) through to the birth and development of the Cretan school in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (with the extraordinary works of Angelos Akotantos and Andreas Ritzos), the workshops of Magna Grecia and the influence of Cretan artists seen in paintings from Mount Athos dating from the second half of the sixteenth century, up until the late seventeenth century developments of the Cretan school and the workshops of Macedonia and central Greece during the first decades of the eighteenth century.