Orthodox Icons
You'll experience:
- Orthodox icons in three different settings
- Belgrade Cathedral
- Private apartment and dramatic personal history of a collector
- An overview of Eastern Christianity
Icon is a piece of art most ubiquitous in Serbian homes. Whatever their relationship to spiritual, religion, tradition or interior decoration, our families are very likely to have an icon of their patron saint hung on the wall. Besides these personal relationships to the family patrons, the role and the history of the icon in the orthodox christianity and its art is of decisive importance.
The story of icons is the visual story of the most defining and dramatic aspects of the orthodox ideologies and cultures. You’ll unravel the story if you join us for the tour of three treasure coves of the orthodox icons in Belgrade.
We start at the Museum of Serbian Orthodox Church, home to the priceless objects and artefacts that its monasteries, churches and dignitaries commissioned, produced and kept. From the Middle Age to the 16th and 17th centuries. My favourite icon from the collection is the most tender and motherly depiction of Mother of God with the Child I’ve ever seen.
Legacy Sekulić, the largest collection of icons on permanent display in Belgrade, includes 160 pieces ranging from 15th to 20th century and from Russia to Italy. A gift from the Sekulić spouses to Belgrade, displayed at their home within the original interior. The personal history of the collector is yet another intricate unthinkable biography of a man who lived and worked in both pre and post WW2 Belgrade.
The Cathedral is where we see the icons in their liturgical and architectural function of the threshold to the divine. Here the icons are in a different visual language to what we’d just seen at Sekulić collection, in a pictorial style that is Western Christian or Central European, pertinent to a specific political moment when the Cathedral was built and decorated in 1830ies+.
