The aesthetics of Orthodox faith.

Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 23-July 4, 2004

Helen C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557), exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 658 pp., 721 color ills., 146 b/w. $75.00; $50.00 (paper)

The last centuries of the Byzantine Empire have often been characterized as a period of decline. Internal political and religious fissures, a waning share in the Mediterranean economy, the loss of regional hegemony following the Fourth Crusade of 1204, and the confrontation with burgeoning states in surrounding territories can all be cited as reasons for the ultimate collapse of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. It is this complex period in world history that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, recently addressed in its exhibition Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557), the third in a series of shows devoted to the formation, development, and dissolution of this remarkable empire. (1) Rather than exploring the impact of the empire's political and economic fortunes on artistic and cultural developments, the Metropolitan Museum show, as its title suggests, focused instead on the religious matrix of Eastern Orthodoxy, which bound together the largely disparate cultures of the Balkans and Russia, Egypt, and Ethiopia, as well as communities in the Near East. As a result, the visitor encountered a somewhat monolithic view of the Orthodox world that minimized differences in society and culture in order to construct a sense of common religious practice. In reality, many of the cultures included in the show prayed in different languages, did not share the same liturgical traditions, answered to different ecclesiastical authorities, and, in some cases, differed substantially on matters of doctrine. The exhibition featured icons as the most prominent manifestation of Orthodox Christianity, and the show's stress on the aesthetics of faith brought viewers face to face with the holiest of figures. Set against porridge-colored and greenish blue walls, these devotional objects were presented as works of art, largely decontextualized and subjected, many for the first time, to purely art historical appreciation and scrutiny. The two previous shows read Byzantine art through its cultural contexts; the framework of this one was different. With its emphasis on the aesthetics of painting over details of religious culture and historical context, this exhibition was designed to appeal to a mass, lay audience for which such concerns may have been deemed irrelevant, uninteresting, or perhaps even offensive.

The decision to take an aesthetic approach to the material signals the difficulties attached to the contextual study of Late Byzantine art and may reveal an attempt, moreover, to avoid certain political pitfalls. More than the art of the Early Christian and Middle Byzantine periods, works and monuments of the last centuries are closely associated with modern national, cultural, and religious identities. Even today, contemporary icon and church painters most often appropriate the style of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for the creation of byzantinizing, that is, Orthodox, devotional images. Most notably, in recent years, the apse of St. Demetrios in Thessalonike, a critical monument of the early Byzantine period, was painted in the Late Byzantine style, a jarring renovation widely criticized by Greek art historians and archaeologists, but one promoted by the city's church leaders. The nationalistic associations of Late Byzantine art has other repercussions, which are manifested in the authorship of the catalog. Unlike the periods highlighted in the first two Metropolitan exhibitions, which are intensely studied by American and Western European scholars, the Late Byzantine period remains, to a large extent, the research area of scholars living and trained in former imperial and neighboring territories. The publication of significant monuments in a wide variety of languages--including Greek, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Russian--poses a particular challenge to "Western" scholars working in this area. The inability of most scholars to read publications in so many languages (in addition to the more standard languages required for the study of art history) often impedes synthetic or cross-cultural approaches to the material; in addition, it makes the material virtually inaccessible to nonspecialists. Thus, part of the awe engendered by the encounter with so many "unknown" objects in Byzantium: Faith and Power, in reality, derived from their publication in English and their display, for the first time, in an American context.

The chronological framework for the show ranged from 1261 to 1557. The first date marks the recovery of Constantinople from its Latin rulers and the installation of the Palaiologoi, the dynasty that would rule the empire in its last centuries. The second date is more problematic. For Byzantinists, the selection of 1557 as a terminal date for this exhibition seems arbitrary. Byzantine rule over the capital ended in May 1453; the remaining parts of the empire were conquered shortly thereafter. In 1557, according to the exhibition catalog, the term Byzantium was first used by Hieronymus Wolf (1516-1580), librarian and secretary to the Fugger family in Augsburg, to define a field of study. (2) Wolf, however, did not invent the name. The fourteenth-century Chronica per extensum descripta of Andrea Dandolo already contains the term "Bysancium" in connection with a prophecy regarding the fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1204. (3) And, whereas Wolf initiated Byzantine studies in Germany, particularly through the editing of texts, other sixteenth-century humanists were doing the same in Holland and Italy. (4) Nonetheless, the Metropolitan's creation of a notional Byzantium that survived as a scholarly construction for 104 years beyond the fall of the empire allowed the organizers to encompass a large number of works that Byzantinists have generally ceded to their colleagues in the field of early modern art.