Embraced by the Mystic Wonders of Byzantium - NYT

[George Bakopoulos]

March 14, 1997

Embraced by the Mystic Wonders of
Byzantium

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

NEW YORK -- Easily overlooked in the vast "Glory of Byzantium" at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a manuscript from the 10th
century, the size of a paperback, with treatises about poisonous
snakes by
Nikander, the ancient Greek poet.

It lies open to an illustration, elegant and linear, of toga-clad
figures in a
leafy landscape. Its naturalism makes it look like something from
Pompeii
and a thousand years older than it is, a reminder that during the
Middle
Ages the legacies of Greece and Rome were kept alive in
Constantinople,
not in the Latin West.

I can't predict whether this remarkable show about the apex of
Byzantine
culture between 843 and 1261 will get people to rethink the way
history
evolved, but no other exhibition of Byzantine art has gone to such
lengths
to spur interest in a slice of the past that few Americans know
much about.
With 350 works, secular and religious, sumptuously installed, the
show
must be one of the most extravagant that the Met has ever done.

It's actually overwhelming, though you'd have to be indifferent to
visual
pleasure not to be amazed immediately by some of the great ivories,
manuscripts, frescoes and silks. The show sweeps you up into
another
world altogether.

What was Byzantium? Many people picture it, if at all, as Yeats
did: as a
vague faraway fairy tale empire of somnolent emperors and pealing
gongs,
an eternal artifice. This exhibition should alter that perception.

Give the Met full credit for doing it. We're accustomed to trophy
exhibitions
that are about nothing so much as a museum's ability to get
glamorous
works from distant places. Those shows can make you skeptical when
you
hear the Met boast that this one is a special feat of diplomacy.
But it is.
You don't have to be Madeleine Albright to notice that the museum
has
somehow got Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, Turkey,
Greece,
Cyprus, the Vatican, Egypt, Israel, Germany and Hungary (among
others)
to contribute.

This involved more than coaxing reluctant politicians. In Bulgaria,
gasoline
could not be found to transport the works from the museum in
Preslav to
the capital, Sofia, so the Met's representative, at the 11th hour,
had to
siphon it from cars at the Bulgarian Culture Ministry.

For 1,500 years, the manuscripts and icons at the Monastery of St.
Catherine at Mount Sinai in Egypt had never left there. Met
officials visited
more than half a dozen times, attending 4 a.m. Mass each day, until
the
monks, clearly wooed, consulted a 400-year-old document, kept in a
reliquary, which, they decided, allowed the icons to leave. That is
fortunate,
because the works are unforgettable and luminous; coming upon a
wall of
them, glowing gold and red, is like moving toward a warm fire.

Much of the credit for the exhibition goes to a Met associate
director,
Mahrukh Tarapor. For years, she crisscrossed the globe, coping in
many
cases with governments whose revolving-door ministries compelled
her to
negotiate from scratch every few months. Gradually, she made all
the
parties involved realize that the show would be good for them, too.

How so? Because it isn't another Monet blockbuster, geared to the
box
office. Organized by Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, curators
at the
Met, it is a genuine effort to grapple with the Byzantine Empire
from the
inside, not as an exotic footnote to the history of the Latin West
but as a
complicated and diverse culture on its own terms, relevant to
millions
today. The monks are still at St. Catherine's, after all, and the
Eastern
Orthodox faith is resurgent in many former Soviet-bloc countries,
which
have lent some of their proudest treasures for the occasion. This
turns out
to be a timely historical show with contemporary reverberations.

Years ago, the Met organized "The Age of Spirituality," about
Byzantium
after 324, when Constantine, having converted to Christianity,
moved the
capital of the Roman Empire to the Bosporus. That show ended before
the
civil war in 723, which broke out over the veneration of icons. The
present
show starts in 843, with the iconoclastic controversy resolved and
the
empire's influence spreading north to Kiev, south to Egypt, west in
Europe,
even east to Islamic Baghdad. The second Byzantine golden age, as
the
show describes it, ended when the Crusaders stormed Constantinople
in
the 13th century. The empire never recovered.

Today one may wonder how a debate about icons provoked civil war,
but
then what of Bosnia and the Middle East? Religious beliefs aren't
easily
grasped from the outside, which is one reason why this exhibition,
more
than many, benefits from return visits: it takes time to adjust to
its deep
and particular spirituality.

Byzantines thought of icons as occupying a mystical space. They
weren't
illusions of the saints they depicted but stand-ins: their essence,
virtually
alive. People talked to them, kissed them. In the show, one of the
ivory
icons, of the Koimesis, the Virgin's sleeping death, is partly
rubbed out by
caresses.

Its composition, classically inspired, features Peter kneeling
behind the
Virgin. He gently places his hand on her womb, as a child might,
the sort of
intimate detail you don't expect if you think of icons only as
hieratic and
aloof. But then neither would you expect "The Archangel With the
Golden
Hair," a gauzily romantic Russian art landmark, the angel's head
inclined,
his huge almond eyes turned sideways. He's Pre-Raphaelite, 700
years
before the fact.

More likely you imagine icons to resemble "The Deacon Stephen," a
12th-century mosaic from a Kiev cathedral (demolished by the
Soviets in
1934). Big and impressive, it's one of the works meant to suggest
the
dizzying scale of decoration in the richest Byzantine churches.
Stephen is
frontal, impassive, his gown flattened and abstracted into a few
curved
lines against the gold backdrop.

He lacks the illusion of depth Westerners equate with reality, but
does this
make him remote? The image looks unearthly, though also direct,
forward,
vivid. Byzantines clearly aimed for this effect, since they also
had at hand
examples of more naturalistic art from antiquity. It takes a leap
of the
imagination to get beyond the abstraction and recognize this
directness.
For the Byzantines, it was a leap of faith.

It's easier to get the point of works like the shoebox-size "Veroli
Casket,"
with ivory panels of classical scenes, or of "The Harbaville
Triptych," also
ivory, with slender, grave saints in rows on the front and a tall
cross
flanked by cypresses entwined with grapevines and ivy on the back.
Above
the cross are stars, below, a fox and lion, tours de force of
minute
craftsmanship.

I was struck by a silver incense burner in the shape of a
multidomed
church like St. Basil's in Red Square, and by a manuscript
illustration of
St. John the Evangelist: he stands stock-still with his Gospel,
head turned
back to the hand of God, which emerges from a corner of the page
like the
hook behind the curtain of a vaudeville stage.

And how can you not be moved by an Annunciation from St.
Catherine's,
Gabriel's body a twisted corkscrew in a billowing gown? Mary is
perfectly
serene. Imprinted on her breast is the faint image of the infant
Jesus, a
miraculous apparition in paint. Barely less miraculous is a small
mosaic of
the Transfiguration from Constantinople composed of thousands of
tiny
cubes of lapis lazuli, marble and glass, each the size of a coarse
grain of
sand.

A description of a show like this can devolve into a laundry list.
Suffice it
to say that the early galleries are about Byzantium itself, the
later ones
about its spreading effects. By the end, you may wonder how you
strayed
into a show of Islamic and Italian art.

It's dense material, and some of the works are hard to decipher. My
attention flagged ultimately. No doubt the terra-cotta icon of St.
Theodore
from Bulgaria and the wood relief of St. George from Kiev were
coups for
the Met to have borrowed, but they're wrecks.

So be it. All you really have to know is that Byzantium changed,
and was
changed by, the cultures it came into contact with. A good example
is in
the last gallery, the great Stavelot Triptych, a 12th-century
gingerbread
construction of gold, silver, enamel, silk and precious stones from
Belgium.

Made as a reliquary for the True Cross, it depicts Constantine and
his
mother, Helena, who is said to have transported the Cross from
Jerusalem
to Constantinople. The silks are Spanish, the enamels Byzantine.
It's an
object made specifically to compete with Byzantium, to rival the
products
of its famed workshops in technique, opulence, even sanctity. In
art like
this, the West moved toward a new frontier, the stirrings of a
Renaissance,
which incorporated a dream of Byzantine glory.

"The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine
Era, A.D.
843 to 1261" remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 82d Street
at
Fifth Avenue, through July 6. It is supported by Alpha Banking
Group and
Citibank, among others.