Mixed Religion

Mixed Religion

The Department of Islamic Art will soon have a neighbor: the new Department of Byzantine and Eastern Christian Art. The whole environment of the Cour Visconti, inaugurated in 2012 for Islamic Art, will be restructured to host the Louvre’s two youngest departments: Islam and Byzantium. How to make them live with one another, talk to each other, display their complicity, their age-old interconnections? Their histories cannot be separated. Take a look at this copper candlestick inlaid with silver and gold, from thirteenth-century Syria (Denon, room 187, AD 4414). It resembles the objects surrounding it, including the famous “Barberini Vase,” by the same artist, exhibited nearby. But look closely and you will notice that the medallions encircling the pedestal depict scenes from the life of Christ: the circumcision, the presentation at the Temple, the wedding at Cana… The form belongs to Islamic art, the iconography, to the eastern Christianity. A little farther on, a sculpted-wood arcature is no less stylistically indistinguishable from the neighboring pieces, but it bears a Hebrew inscription and comes from a synagogue, not from a mosque (OA 6348). Here, in this crossroads of the Louvre, the three monotheistic religions meet