Returning From Texas at Age 700
The dome fresco from a church in the town of Lysi will return to Cyprus
Hester and Hardaway Photography
Kelly Crow
24/9/2011
After more than two decades, a pair of Byzantine-era chapel frescoes in Houston is heading home—to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Houston’s Menil Collection on Friday said it had agreed to return the 700-year-old wall paintings to the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus, ending a long-term loan arrangement between the museum and the church.
The frescoes originally adorned an 8-foot-wide dome and apse in a 13th-century Orthodox chapel in Lysi, a town in northern Cyprus. The semicircular apse fresco depicts Christ’s mother Mary draped in a burgundy robe with her arms upraised in a gesture of blessing. The dome fresco shows a haloed Christ, with a droopy mustache, surrounded by a ring of smaller, fluttering angels in jewel-toned robes. Thanks to the scale and individuality of the figures, the works represent a tour de force of Byzantine art, said Kristina Van Dyke, the Menil’s curator for collections and research.
The story of the frescoes’ trip to Texas (and back) begins with the French collector Dominique de Menil, who began buying art in Paris in the 1940s, shortly before she and her banker husband, John, moved to Houston to escape World War II. Ms. de Menil eventually amassed a collection of 17,000 objects, from antiquities to modern masters, and opened a namesake museum there in 1987.
A few years earlier, Ms. de Menil learned that looters, following the Turkish occupation of Cyprus in 1974, had used chainsaws and chisels to carve out a pair of frescoes from the Lysi chapel and were hawking the fragments on the black market. She alerted Cyprus’s Orthodox archbishop, and together they worked out a ransom plan: She bought the works—all 38 fragments—on behalf of the church for $522,085 in exchange for the right to display them, long-term, in Houston.
Chief conservator Brad Epley said that it took more than three years for conservators to piece the curved frescoes back together. Workers initially carved matching foam pieces to see how well they fit together and later created plastic and fabric tubs to support the works’ plaster backing. In 1997, Ms. de Menil, a Catholic, built a chapel on her museum campus to display the works.
In mid-February, the museum’s loan period will end, and Cyprus’s Archbishop Chrysostomos II plans to exhibit the works in the Byzantine Museum in the capital city of Nicosia, according to Costas Katsaros, who heads the archbishopric’s legal department. Because Turkey still occupies the region around Lysi, Mr. Katsaros said that the frescoes won’t return to their original setting.
Ms. Van Dyke said that the handover is “bittersweet” for the museum, but curators are already brainstorming ways to repurpose the chapel space with other artworks.
