The aesthetics of Orthodox faith.

In the first seven galleries works made in Constantinople were juxtaposed with those fabricated in such varied settings as Serbia, Armenia, and Ethiopia, creating an impression of cultural harmony, religious unity, and artistic similitude. In the midst of this laudable multiculturalist vision, however, Byzantium, the Greek-speaking empire of the show's title, was all but lost. One might expect that the exhibition would begin with a gallery dedicated to works that originated in Constantinople in order to foreground the core elements of Byzantine art in its last centuries. Indeed, numerous entries in the accompanying catalog referred to works as exemplary of Palaiologan style or as examples of the Palaiologan Renaissance. The use of such concepts might have been tested in a separate gallery. Another important problem raised in the first half of the show was the question of dating and provenance. With the field of Late Byzantine studies in art history largely in its infancy and with many works still unpublished, a number of the objects in the show could only be assigned broadly to a century or two. Future work should help refine these dates as more comparative material becomes available. Similarly, for many works the attribution to specific sites of manufacture remained premature. Many of the labels listed multiple cities for the provenance, often followed by question marks. In a number of cases, the provenance was given generically as Byzantium, frustratingly broad but unfortunately accurate. Scholars of the period are well aware that styles particular to specific regions flourished simultaneously and independently. The movement of artists as political fortunes changed further complicates the picture. Corollary to the issue of style--whether Byzantine or byzantinizing--is the question of influence, which was omnipresent throughout the galleries. The nature of such influence is critical to the understanding of the material, for after the seventh gallery the exhibition shifted to the interaction of the Orthodox peoples with their non-Orthodox neighbors.

The next (small) gallery raised the issue of Byzantium and Islam. This, the eighth gallery, contained an odd assortment of objects produced either for Islamic communities or for indigenous Christians in Islamic lands. A number of important works in this gallery contained views of Constantinople following its fall to the Ottoman Turks. Of particular interest was a woodblock depicting the siege of the Byzantine capital in 1453 (cat. no. 247A). Other views, such as the procession of Suleyman the Magnificent through the hippodrome by Pieter Coecke van Aelst (cat. no. 253), displayed the pageantry of the Ottoman court while recording documentary evidence for the survival of Byzantine monuments in the postconquest city. Two examples of sixteenth-century brocaded silks with Christian themes (cat. nos. 269, 270) reveal the tolerance of the Ottomans for the continued production of ecclesiastical textiles. Yet several objects in the gallery merited inclusion here only by the narrowest criteria. A late-twelfth-century Psalter housed in Constantinople's famous Hodegon Monastery in the fourteenth century (a recent gift to the museum) was selected by virtue of an inscription of 1554 (not visible in the display) recording the execution of the Christian Nicholas Pazartis in the hippodrome (cat. no. 255). Similarly, several excluded items would have been welcome additions, such as textiles with tiraz bands of the kind noted by Antonio Pisanello, which made their way into so many Italian paintings of the period, and metal objects decorated with Christian themes, which would have complemented the enameled glass bottle and glazed amphora (cat. no. 244). Altogether, the display of such diverse objects within a single gallery might have offered an opportunity to evaluate the artistic koine that has been noted in luxury arts of the eastern Mediterranean.