Preserving sacred images, advancing scholarship
Before synthetic blue existed, the color of the Virgin's mantle was mined from a single valley in Afghanistan and carried across continents at a price that rivaled gold. Iconsete traces the material biography of natural ultramarine — and what its presence in American collections asks of those who steward it today.
X-ray fluorescence, infrared reflectography, and Raman spectroscopy are transforming how American conservators read sacred icons. What emerges beneath the surface — hidden underdrawings, repainted saints, and pigments traced to Afghan mines and colonial Boston — is rewriting the biography of these objects.
Eight centuries before the selfie, Byzantine painters had already mastered the mechanics of being looked at. This examination of iconographic convention reveals how eye placement, scale, and direction encoded an entire theology of presence, one that still shapes how American viewers respond to portraiture today.
Across the United States, centuries of religious iconography are slipping from public view as parishes close, deaccession, and sell. Iconsete examines the scholars and conservators racing to document these works before they disappear — and the stewardship models that could bring them back into the light.