Dear colleagues,
Just in case anyone needs a 'scholarly' excuse to visit New York for the
holidays. Sigh.
Got this from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/17/arts/17SMIT.html
Dont sue me, OK?
George
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
November 17, 2000
ART REVIEW
Sailing Again to Byzantium
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 cloisonn้, 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.
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