Exhibition Spring 2024
Our new exhibition will be on view in the gallery at 6 Clarendon Cross, W114AP and will be live online on 26th March. Click here to view. It’s inevitable that some of the items are already sold though, in some cases, the new owners have kindly agreed to leave them in our gallery until the end of May. One of these is the exceptional Saint Sergius of Radonezh, a 16th century icon first handled by the Temple Gallery in 1962. There is also an important and unusually beautiful small icon of the Annunciation attributable to the Dionisy workshop of the late 15th century. Other notable pieces are the large Northern School 17th century icon of the Presentation of Christ, and an attractive Cretan Madonna and Child. ca. 1700
A feature of our Spring event is a collection of antique Ethiopian metal crosses.
TRAVEL
The Temple Gallery is planning a two-day trip to the Ikonenmuseum at Recklinghausen, near Dusseldorf in Germany (£885.00). Recklinghausen is the largest and most comprehensive collection of Russian and Greek icons in the western world. It was founded in 1956 (three years before the Temple Gallery) on the passion and generosity of two private individuals. The collection is justifiably renowned as an important academic institution and is unique in western Europe. Indeed no institution in the West can compare with its scope and compass which now comprises some 4,000 items as well as embroideries, miniatures, and metalwork from the Orthodox world of Eastern Christianity: Russia, Greece, the Balkans and Ethiopia. An interesting collection of Coptic art documents the transition from the pagan world of late antiquity to early Christianity.
Especially notable in the museum are a significant number of world-class masterpieces, widely known through publications. Here are some of them that we shall see.
Our trip to the ancient Kingdom of Georgia in May is fully booked and now closed.
I’ll be glad to hear from anyone interested in the following. It’s still only in my mind’s eye, but I am thinking of a long weekend trip to Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum (Bruegel), Academy of Fine Arts (Hieronymus Bosch), Albertina, (Durer), not to speak of music to be heard. Also Napoli’s Capodimonte has world-masterpiece paintings from the Habsburg, Farnese, and Bourbon collections by Raphael, Titian, Masaccio's Crucifixion, Botticelli's Madonna with Child and Angels, Bellini's Transfiguration, Bruegel’s The Blind Leading the Blind and other wonders.
Exhibition: Africa and Byzantium at Cleveland Museum
This important exhibition, now transitioning from the Metropolitan Museum New York, will be at Cleveland Ohio and later at the Toledo Museum of Art from August 17th, 2024 to November 10th, 2024. The show explores the tradition of Byzantine art and culture in North and East Africa from the 4th through to the 15th century and beyond. The catalogue, edited by Andrea Myers Achi, is available from Yale University Press.
Exhibition: In the Sky with Diamonds, Lucy Temple. New exhibition at The Royal Liver Building, Liverpool 1st - 7th May 2024.
LEARNING
The Temple Gallery maintains close links with the King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts whose ethos, philosophy and history are comprehensively laid out on their website, as well as courses available to the public on sacred geometry, icon painting and other traditional arts. We recommend anyone interested in the traditions of sacred art to visit this site. Click here.
Publications
1. Michael Allswang, Symbolism, Modern Thought and Ancient Egypt. The first part of this accessible and marvellously thorough work is a comprehensive survey of European science’s search for Reality. The author takes us from the wisdom of tribal societies and the Pre-Socratics, through Newton and the rise of science and into the new sciences of astrophysics, holography and systems theories of the 20th and 21st centuries. All this is viewed through the eyes of the Perennialist schools of Coomaraswamy, Guénon and their followers. The second part establishes ancient Egypt as the original model of a society founded on truth; a civilization based on the principles of the Higher Knowledge and the Cosmos. Egypt was a civilization based essentially on esoteric spirituality through the use of symbolism. Click here to purchase.
2. Oleg Tarasov, How Divine Images Became Art, Essays on the Rediscovery, Study and Collecting of Medieval Icons in the Belle Epoque, Open Books 2024. This is a valuable correction to the prejudice surprisingly still held by many academic art historians against ‘primitive’ or pre-Renaissance art. The most important part of this book is the chapter ‘Florenskii, Metaphysics and Reverse Perspective.’
3. Black and White magazine are publishing an interview with Alain de Lotbinière, author of the book Russian Soul which came out of the Temple Gallery's trip to Russia in 2020. The article will appear in issue No. 289 of a magazine entitled Black + White Photography and should be on sale around April 14. A link to magazine's website can be found here.
Dr Richard Temple Illustrated Lectures on YouTube
Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism. 4th March, 2024. Images of Cosmic Descent in Icons. Click here to view.
Temenos Academy. 7th July 2021. Icons, Image and Presence. Click here to view.
Kings Foundation School of Traditional Arts. 26th January 2022. Art as a Vehicle for Sacred Knowledge. Click here to view.
Kings Foundation School of Traditional Arts. 21st February 2024. Born of the Virgin Mary, A Study in Esoteric Christianity. Click here to view.
With warmest wishes and a Happy Easter to everyone,
Dick Temple