UPDATED! The Gennadius Library's Clean Monday celebration in New York City will have a change of venue this year to Kellari Taverna and will be held on February 27, 2012. Festivities begin at 6:30 pm. and feature great food for the Lenten season, an auction, music and dancing! Read details here.
The Stathatos Room
The room at the far end of the West wing is the creation of the collector Helen Stathatou. When, at about 1920 she learned that a church in Arta, known for its carved woodwork, was about to be torn down, she acquired the carvings and arranged them in her drawing room in her house in Athens. This entire room was given by her to the Gennadius Library and was faithfully reconstructed as it had stood in her house. Helen Stathatou also donated eight religious post-Byzantine icons. With one exception the artists are all Cretan in origin and the icons were made in the Ionian islands. There are three icons by Theodoros Poulakis, a well-known artist who was born in Chania in 1622 and died in Corfu in 1692; a 17th century icon by Antonios Skordilis, a Cretan priest; an icon depicting the Archangel Michael by Emmanuel Lambardos of Rethymnon, dated 1598 (the oldest in the collection); an icon of the Birth of the Virgin by the artist Victor, dated 1674; an impressive icon of St. Andrew, dated 1600, by Emmanuel Tzanes, who was born in Rethymnon in 1610 and died in Venice in 1690; finally, the most recent of the icons displaying a 1718 miracle of St. Eleutherius was painted by Konstantinos Kontarinis, a Cretan whose few recorded works seem to have been executed in Corfu.