Les icônes peintes du Louvre. Histoire d’une collection

Résumé 0

Today, who knows that the Louvre is one of the very first major museums to possess a collection of icons? The object of this study is to retrace, for the first time, the two centuries of the particularly turbulent history of this collection. Oriented in the beginning towards the Cretan School, the icon collection of the Louvre was almost entirely dispersed to the museums in the provinces during the latter third part of the 19th century. It was only with the development of the French school of scholars of Byzantine art in the first third of the 20th century and above all the creation of the department of Christian Antiquities in 1954 that the collection of icons in the Louvre was able to rise from its ashes thanks to purchases, the return of works from provincial mu-seums and a reorientation towards the Russian School.