Sailing Again to Byzantium

[nick cobb]

>
> Sailing Again to Byzantium
> http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/17/arts/17SMIT.html
> November 17, 2000
> ART REVIEW
> By ROBERTA SMITH
>
> LIKE Byzantium itself, the new galleries for Byzantine and early
> medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are centrally located,
> on the way to everything else. Even the most casual visitor to the
> museum has passed through them: the long, broad hallways that run on
> either side of the Grand Staircase on the museum's main floor, just
> beyond the central ticket booths in the Great Hall.
> Year in and year out, these passages accommodate a steady stream of
> visitors headed elsewhere: for the Medieval Galleries, the American
> Wing, the Arms and Armor Galleries, the European Sculpture and
> Decorative Arts Galleries and beyond. During the holiday season they
> are especially heavily traveled, being the straight line that is the
> shortest distance between the main entrance and the Christmas tree.
> Until now, this route, along with the spaces just behind the Grand
> Staircase, seemed to languish in neglect, like Cinderella. While
> everything around them was doted on expanded or renovated or both
> they remained untouched for nearly 50 years. Portions of their cases
> were given over at various points to French sculpture, smaller
> displays of Byzantine art and the museum's Greek and Roman Treasury.
> For a time the north hallway was even ceded to the museum shop.
> Now, after three years of redesign, refurbishing and architectural
> exploration, these spaces are definitely a "visitor destination" in
> their own right. It may have helped that Prince Charming, or the Fairy
> Godmother, finally arrived in the form of Mary and Michael Jaharis,
> collectors who have lent Byzantine art to the Met and who are the
> major benefactors of the project.
> Ingeniously expanded with newfound floor space and reclaimed wall
> space (of which more later) and brilliantly installed, these new
> galleries are a big deal in a small but impeccable package. Inch for
> inch, their relatively modest 4,900 square feet may cover more
> ground in history, art mediums and geography than any other
> permanent galleries at the museum. They bring the Western Hemisphere's
> premier collection of Byzantine art more completely into view than
> ever before, making the many faces of this complex culture and its
> broad influence intimately available.
> The nearly 700 works, often small, range around a quarter of the globe
> and through nearly 15 centuries, tracing a network that reflects the
> spread of religion, warfare, trade, artistic techniques and political
> domination. The displays include intricately carved ivory icons and
> reliquaries, brilliantly colored cloisonn , gleaming liturgical
> objects, numerous coins, jewelry of all kinds, glass, textiles, carved
> stone sculpture, sarcophagi and architectural decoration, and
> fragments of mosaics and frescoes.
> Some of the Met's most prized objects are back on view, including
> seventh-century works like the nine silver and gilded silver chalices
> of the Attarouthi Treasure and, from an archaeological find known as
> the Second Cyprus Treasure, six silver plates that depict scenes from
> the early life of David in a robust Classical style that reflects the
> vitality with which Greek and Roman motifs were recycled in the
> Byzantine world.
> One can once more appreciate the full brunt of J. P. Morgan's
> obsession with early religious art and small valuable objects, as well
> as the lavishness of his 1917 bequest to the Met, which included more
> than one- third of the artworks in these galleries, the Second Cyprus
> Treasure among them. And recent acquisitions are on permanent view for
> the first time, like the monumental personification of the goddess
> Ktisis from A.D. 500-550, once part of a glass-and- marble mosaic
> floor.
> The deliberately diverse, wide- ranging nature of this installation
> represents what might be called the diffusion approach to art history.
> Instead of an exclusive focus on a single civilization, it operates on
> the theory that singularity is in fact a kind of fiction and that any
> culture is an inherently unstable sum of parts that are constantly in
> motion, both aesthetically and geographically.
> This approach works particularly well with the shifting mass of
> peoples and cultures that constituted the long-lived Byzantine
> Empire, founded in 324, when the Roman Emperor Constantine the
> Great, having embraced Christianity in 313, moved the capital of
> his empire from Rome to Constantinople. It lasted until 1453, when,
> after nearly two centuries of the empire's decline, the Ottoman
> Turks seized the capital for good. In between, it produced two
> lengthy golden ages, survived numerous invasions from Slavic and
> Germanic peoples, Muslims and Christian Crusaders and at various
> times reached north to the Danube, west to Spain, east to Syria and
> south to Thebes. Vikings served as the imperial guard. The empire's
> ships traveled as far east as Sri Lanka, importing silks from China
> until the Byzantines figured out how to raise silkworms themselves.
>
> So it is more than appropriate that these galleries should reveal the
> Byzantine age coming and going. The display even backs up a millennium
> or two to begin with a case of Bronze Age objects from England,
> Ireland, Scandinavia. A bit anomalous, perhaps, but given the amount
> of northern European metalwork here most notably a cache of heavily
> jeweled, ninth-century Frankish disc brooches from Morgan they
> provide logical historical background and a sense of the local
> cultures with which Byzantine influences interacted.
> This varied display also continues what might be called the deflation
> of the myth of the mystical otherness of Byzantine art, a tack also
> taken by the wide-ranging "Glory of Byzantium" exhibition mounted by
> the Met in 1997. Hence religious objects, like the spectacular Antioch
> chalice, which depicts Jesus and the Apostles seated among coiling,
> grape-laden vines, are contrasted with things secular: cheaply
> produced, suavely sgraffitoed ceramic plates (think Picasso);
> griffin-shaped copper-alloy lamps; cast-iron steelyard weights in the
> forms of Athena and a Byzantine empress.
> We are repeatedly reminded that Byzantium was not only the source of
> the seemingly exotic religious art of Armenia and Russia, but of
> Western religious art as well. For example, most of the perspectival
> challenges tackled by Renaissance painting seem to have been outlined
> in Byzantine ivory icons as early as 550, as exemplified by an ivory
> diptych showing the aged Jesus on one panel and the Virgin and Child
> on the other. It is impossible to look at them without thinking of
> Masaccio, Piero and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. (The diptych is one of
> three ivories on loan until 2002 from the Museum for Byzantine Art in
> Berlin, currently closed for extensive post-Soviet-era renovations.
> Don't miss them.)
> As for the small, impeccable package, the new galleries exemplify the
> Met's skill at inward expansion. But more important, they seem tailor
> made for this material. The centerpiece of the renovation is the
> creation of the tiny Crypt gallery, a sloping but arched and
> brick-lined space under the Grand Staircase that was storage space
> until exhibition designers and curators began rummaging around and
> engineers were consulted about how much could be carved away.
> Reminiscent of a catacomb or a pyramid's inner sanctum, the Crypt
> connects the two hallways, forming a configuration now known as the
> Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art. It also turns
> out to be the perfect place for light-sensitive textiles including
> completely intact tunics banded with motifs of Dionysian revelers
> from Byzantine Egypt. And it works well for Islamic-influenced
> architectural decorations in carved stone from Egyptian monasteries,
> as well as what can only be described as an early gargoyle, a stone
> carving of a human head jutting out from between acanthus leaves.
> Every nook in this triple-bayed cranny has been put to use. Nearly a
> dozen carved stone Egyptian funerary steles early gravestones are
> shoehorned into double-sided vitrines built into floor-level arches.
> In addition, the removal of three walls in the gallery behind the
> Grand Staircase has brought to light a curved and domed apselike space
> covered since the 50's. Here, works of early medieval art, including
> ferocious stone capitals, becalmed wood sculptures of the Virgin and
> Child, and wonderful Carolingian and Ottonian ivories, are on view.
> Overhead hangs a larger-than-life carved and painted wood sculpture of
> Jesus alive on the Cross. It is late 12th-century, from a monastery in
> northern Italy, and it looks toward galleries of medieval art just
> ahead. But it also looks back, recalling the Byzantine penchant for
> depicting Jesus on the Cross as an alert, dignified and comfortably
> robed prince rather than a suffering martyr. This convention is well
> illustrated by a vivid late eighth-century, enamel reliquary lid in a
> case in the south hallway. Only a few inches square, it lies in wait
> for people hurrying past who think they've got more important things
> to look at.