The following papers stem from the virtual international conference Collecting Orthodox Art in the West: A History and Look Towards the Future held at the Icon Museum and Study Center in June 2021. The conference examined the motivation and means of icon collecting, and inquired into systems of classification and customs of display in North America and Europe. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the globalization of the world’s economy, and the digital revolution of the last few decades, the focus, reach, and habits of collectors have been radically transformed, but exactly how the situation today compares with that of past generations of collectors of Orthodox art has only begun to be explored. A conference addressing major collectors of icons in the last few centuries therefore seemed timely.

The collectors and collections highlighted by the volume’s contributors reveal some enduring themes and many surprises. Like collectors in other realms, icon collectors were fascinated by a variety of aspects of the wider cultures they pursued. Whether Orthodox religion, a nebulous “Greek” past, or the hidden world of “Russia,” wide swaths of premodern history were perceived within the makeup of iconography. Workshop skill, glimpsed in the fashioning of materials such as enamel, and rituals, such as the liturgy, as well as family connections to places reminiscent of the Old World captivated the imaginations of collectors over the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

Collectors played a central role in the establishment of Byzantine Studies as a discipline in Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America. They also laid the framework for the study of post-Byzantine art, which has long lay at the fringe of academic research on icons. In the mid-twentieth century Richard Hare, a professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, formed possibly the first icon collection in the UK, publishing a book that integrated the icon into Slavonic Studies; in eighteenth-century Rome Agostino Mariotti, a member of the Italian Academy of Arcadia, collected icons as examples of the Byzantine liturgical rite; in the 1930s, Joseph Davies, a diplomat to the Soviet Union, collected icons to donate to his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin–Madison; while for Amy Putnam icons remained mostly a private obsession, even as she and her sister sought to strengthen southern Californian culture with the donation to local museums of Old Master painting. In a sense, the Putnam sisters’ collecting efforts were diametrically opposed to those of Alexander Zvenigorodsky, the late- nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat. He published his collection of “Byzantine” enamels in a limited-run edition illustrated with sumptuous chromolithographs; the volume was in production for almost a decade. This is a distant time-scale to the hastily produced catalogue of Davies’ collection, which was built, transported from Moscow, and installed in Madison all within the course of a single year. Collecting has divergent temporalities as well, and the contributions to this issue of the Journal of Icon Studies illuminate those micro time-scales.

The plurality of perspectives offered in this volume reflects the historical vagaries inherent in the history of collecting and display. In hindsight it is easy to see patterns and through-lines, if not developmental narratives and teleologies. Yet, each contribution reveals the often random or accidental paths by which works wind up together as parts of collections; only later do scholars project order onto the chaos, making sense out of vicissitude. A second disconcerting theme is that collecting can be a surprisingly destructive activity, breaking up and dispersing the very objects it seeks to elevate and preserve. Wholes are sacrificed for the sake of owning a part, and in the quest to possess, singular artifacts are often fragmented and scattered. Similarly, collections lovingly compiled over a lifetime can be swiftly dispersed on the collector’s death, destroying the perception of aesthetic coherence and historical importance. While the essays in this volume reveal a range of motivations, across a broad geography–spanning Italy, Russia, the UK, and, within the US, the East Coast, Midwest, and West Coast–there is a surprising amount of interconnectivity and awareness between collectors, dealers, and scholars. The world of icon collecting is, to be sure, relatively self-contained, but the ambition of its collectors contradicts any notion that they are isolated from dominant art historical narratives.

Each of the following studies can be conceived as contributing to a sort of atlas of visual perceptions–an evolving record of past efforts in collecting icons and related artifacts across a diffuse geography. The contributions are all historiographic in nature: the authors are least of all interested in going “behind” the collector to correct or update their attributions and evaluations from a scientific, conservation based approach, or by using an updated rubric. Rather the volume, as a whole, seeks to contextualize the assumptions and tastes of collectors which led to their focus on a very special type of object–the icon, which intersects with domains of learning and art movements in exciting ways: from Classics, to Modernism, to Religion, to a renewed focus on, and appreciation of, the Decorative Arts in the nineteenth century.