The Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Benaki Museum organize, in cooperation with Museums of the USA, the temporary exhibition “Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections”.
The exhibition will remain open from the 6 October 2013 until the 2 March 2014 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, from the 9 April until the 25 August 2014 in the Museum J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles and from the end of September 2014 until February 2015 in the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago.
The evolution of art through the whole life of Byzantium is presented in the exhibition, from the period of late antiquity in the 4th c. until the end of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th c.
Internationally recognized masterpieces of Byzantine art, many of which had not travelled again to the USA, together with recent acquisitions of Greek Museums participate in the exhibition. Among them there are icons, sculptures, mosaics, fragments of mural paintings, manuscripts, jewelry, works of metalwork and embroidery, ceramics and glass objects.
The Museum of Byzantine Culture participates with fourteen (14) artefacts of its permanent exhibition. Among them there are some works of unique art, such as the icon of Christ Pantokrator (known as the Wisdom of God) of the 14th c., the Epitaph of Thessaloniki, famous work of the gold embroidery, also from the 14th c., a silver reliquary of the 4th c., from an excavation in Chalkidiki, and a elaborately decorated Gospel (11th-12th c.), which was made in Constantinople and until recently was kept in a church of Thessaloniki.