Byzantine Fresco Chapel

Museum building in Houston, Texas

The Byzantine Fresco Chapel is a part of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, near the University of St. Thomas. From February 1997 to February 2012, it displayed the only intact Byzantine frescoes of this size and importance in the western hemisphere. The Byzantine frescoes had been taken from the church of St. Evphemianos in Lysi, Cyprus in the 1980s. In September 2011, the collection announced that the frescos would be permanently returned to Cyprus in February 2012, following the conclusion of a long term loan agreement with the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus. The frescoes had been presented at the museum by agreement with the Church of Cyprus, their owners, but the church decided not to extend the loan further. They will not return to their original home as Lysi is now in Northern Cyprus, but will be displayed at the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia. On March 4, 2012, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel closed, but re opened in 2015 for the first in a series of site specific projects.

The chapel was opened in February 1997, and displayed masterworks from the 13th century—a dome with Christ Pantocrator and an apse depicting the Virgin Mary, the Panagia. The frescoes had been stolen from a chapel near Lysi in the Turkish occupied section of Cyprus in the 1980s, cut into 38 pieces, and shipped to Germany by thieves to sell them in the arts black market. The 38 fresco fragments were bought from the thieves by the Houston based Menil Foundation on behalf of the Church of Cyprus, the rightful owner of the frescoes. The Menil Foundation then funded a careful restoration of the paintings. These intact frescoes were unique in the western hemisphere. The depiction of Christ gazing directly forward "has driven time out of space. His gaze is transworldly: not looking but all seeing."

The $4 million building was designed by architect François de Menil. The interior combines rough stone, opaque glass, and rich woods, to create a space that is both art museum and spiritual space. The suspended glass "walls" are not replicas of the chapel that the frescoes were removed from, but created a new context for displaying the icons. In order not to simply replicate the original chapel, de Menil designed "a mediating external building with an embedded steel structure – a 'reliquary box' – which forms a neutral enclosure for a freestanding chapel," according to Christine Slessor in The Architectural Review. The Byzantine chapel is oriented to face the cardinal directions – the facades face directly north, south, east and west. The enclosed space measures approximately There are no windows on the surface area of the building, except for a skylight of of clear, double glazed glass, which permits natural light to pervade the interior. A rough limestone wall on the outside of the building evoked the rough construction of the original chapel in Cyprus.