The aesthetics of Orthodox faith.

The right side of the gallery contained a case of liturgical objects, including a very rare work, a wooden casket today in the Cleveland Museum of Art (cat. no. 73). Recently studied in detail by Kristine Hess, (7) the box is covered with scenes from the life of John the Baptist and most likely served as a reliquary (Fig. 1). Comparisons to ivory caskets of the Middle Byzantine period are inevitable and raise the question of the availability of precious materials in the centuries covered by the show. In the 1340s, Alexios Makrembolites refers to the use of wooden coffers (rather than ivory?) by the wealthy to store their coins. (8) The types of materials presented in the show, so different from those seen in the second exhibition of the series, The Glory of Byzantium, revealed something about the economic realities of the period. One is reminded that in the fourteenth century the emperor John VI Kantakouzenos was so impoverished that he was reduced to drinking from clay and tin goblets rather than those of gold and silver. (9) References to these issues would have greatly enhanced the educational value of the exhibition.

Examples of monumental painting, largely provincial and extremely fragmentary, confronted viewers in the small gallery that followed. Representing the excellent painting of Mystra, for example, were twelve small segments taken from excavated or dilapidated churches in that once-glorious city; of these, five were illustrated in the catalog (cat. nos. 48A-E). In contrast to the picture of damaged frescoes offered by the exhibition, ecclesiastical wall painting from this period survives in abundance: hundreds of churches with complete fresco cycles are preserved in Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and elsewhere. The small photographs from the interior of a number of churches shown as supplemental visual images on labels failed to convey the extent and quality of monumental painting in this period. Curiously, a number of exhibition labels referred to these absent cycles, which, in addition to their inherent significance, often provide fixed dates for the attribution of undated and unsigned works such as icons. The label for a miniature mosaic icon of the Twelve Feasts in the next gallery, for example, stated that the detailed depictions "may reflect the now-lost mosaic program of the great fourteenth-century Constantinopolitan Church in the Chora monastery." The value of the comparison to a lost work of art is dubious, and the introduction of a nonrepresented church on a museum label raises a question about the intended audience for such explanatory texts. Why were larger representative photographs of key cycles not added to give such comparisons validity? (10) These might have been placed in the entry vestibule or in the small reading room situated at the center of the exhibition.

In addition to monumental painting, the same gallery contained manuscripts from Byzantium, Armenia, Rus', and Serbia. Here, a number of important terms and ideas were introduced on the labels, although they were left unexplored or inadequately explained. For example, the term Hesychasm, which refers to one of the great monastic spiritual movements of the Late Byzantine period, was advanced in connection with a fragment of fourteenth-century church decoration from Pskov, Russia (cat. no. 46), and a manuscript containing the theological works of John VI Kantakouzenos (cat. no. 171). On the museum label for the Pskov paintings, the suggestion was made that Hesychasm may have influenced the selection of the dark, severe colors. While art historians and theologians have investigated potential connections between Hesychasm and artistic developments in the late medieval period, particularly in Byzantium and Russia, direct relations have been neither securely established nor universally accepted. Other manuscripts in the gallery raised the concept of cultural influence through the display of a bilingual Gospel Book (cat. no. 162, opened to a page with an image rather than one revealing the two-column bilingual text) and other works that variously pointed to the influence of Franciscan missionaries (cat. no. 173) or, more generally, the Gothic West.