The Icon Museum And Study Center Presents SACRED PRESENCE: VIRGIN OF KAZAN

The Icon Museum and Study Center will present Sacred Presence: Virgin of Kazan, an intimate exhibition celebrating the beauty and spiritual significance of the Kazanskaya Mother of God icon from March 22, 2024 – August 25, 2024.

This focus exhibit, guest curated by author and docent, Dennis J. Sardella, highlights a magnificent version of the icon in the Museum's collection. The exhibition will also feature a selection of icons and objects related to this important image, hidden treasures from the Museum's vault, some of which will be on view for the first time.

The Kazan Mother of God (Kazanskaya Bogomater' in Russian) is a highly revered icon, beloved of the people and hailed as a holy protectress. For centuries people prayed before the Kazan Mother of God for support and protection, couples were blessed with it before their marriages, and people hung it by their children's cribs and in places of honor in their homes, turning to it whenever they faced trouble, disease, and misfortune. The Kazanskaya was also called upon for assistance in times of national peril. By the end of the nineteenth century there were thousands of icons of the Kazan Mother of God in Russian homes. The Icon Museum and Study Center is home to different examples of this iconography.

Sacred Presence: Virgin of Kazan tells the story of this image through the lens of a single seventeenth-century icon, which is one of the highlights in the Museum's collection. This monumental icon, painted around 1650, dates to less than seventy-five years after the Kazanskaya cult of devotion was founded. The icon's size, the iconographer's warm color palette, and the imposing figure of the Mother of God, who is dressed in a purple mantle (maphorion), enables the panel to command the space around it, whereas the gentle melancholy of the Virgin's gaze has an almost magnetic attraction.

Guest Curator, Dennis J. Sardella, will lead several gallery talks discussing reflections on the Kazanskaya icon of the Mother of God, its iconography, form, spiritual journey, allure, and beauty, as well as its cooption by political and religious actors up to our modern times. Sardella will be available after each gallery talk to sign copies of his book, Visible Image of the Invisible God. Sardella's book is a comprehensive and beautifully illustrated introduction to icons, their origins, history, and symbolism. It will be available for sale in The Icon Museum and Study Center gift shop during the exhibition.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Dennis J. Sardella, PhD has been a docent at the Museum for twelve years, where he leads gallery tours and introduces visitors to the world of Byzantine and Russian icons. He writes and speaks regularly to civic and church groups on the topics of religious icons and the role they play in Eastern Christian spirituality — at last count, nearly fifty presentations.

A professor of chemistry at Boston College for forty-five years, Sardella taught and researched the areas of spectroscopy and molecular structure. In 1990 he became the founding director of the Boston College Presidential Scholars Program, a university-wide co-curricular honors program, and directed it until 2010.

ABOUT THE ICON MUSEUM AND STUDY CENTER

The Icon Museum and Study Center (formerly The Museum of Russian Icons), founded in 2006 by the American entrepreneur Gordon Lankton, holds the most comprehensive collection of icons in the US, including a growing collection of Greek, Veneto-Cretan, and Ethiopian icons. Spanning over six centuries, the collection showcases the development of the icon from its Egyptian and Byzantine roots and explores the spread of Orthodoxy across cultures. The Museum serves as a place for education, contemplation, and experiencing the beauty and spirituality of icons. The permanent collection and temporary exhibitions offer unparalleled opportunities to situate Eastern Christian art within a global context and to explore its connection to contemporary concerns and ideas. The Museum's Study Center stimulates object-based learning and multidisciplinary research and aims to share its research in the field of Eastern Christian art with wide audiences through an active slate of academic and public programs.

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