Faith and power: the Metropolitan Museum's triptych of Byzantine exhibitions reaches its conclusion with an unparalleled overview of the art of the Palaiologan era. Angeliki Lymberopoulou celebrates a remarkable achievement

Apollo, June, 2004 by Angeliki Lymberopoulo

Twenty seven years ago, the Metropolitan Museum hosted an exhibition 'Age of Spirituality', dedicated to the early Byzantine period (324-843). This was followed in 1997 by the very popular 'Glory of Byzantium', which focused on the middle Byzantine period (843-1261). 'Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)' is the third in this landmark series, and the first major show ever to celebrate the last phase of Byzantine culture.

Two significant dates provide its time frame: 1261 marks the end of the Latin rule in Constantinople following the fall of the city to western troops during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The Palaiologans, the last indigenous dynasty, claimed the imperial throne, lending their name to an era of cultural flourishing with intense intellectual, scholarly and artistic activity. Artists developed a distinctive style that favoured tall, robust figures, with the articulation of their bodies revealed through their garments, as seen it] the archangel Gabriel in the superb, two-sided icon of the Annunciation originally from the church of the Virgin Peribletos, Ohrid.

Although this era came to a dramatic end with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the exhibition carries on until 1557, when, for the first time ever, the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf applied the term 'Byzantine' to the long-lasting empire. Its inhabitants would not have responded to this designation, since they considered themselves the heirs to the eastern Roman Empire and called themselves Romans. Wolf, however, by using a variant of Byzantion, the name of the Greek city subsumed by Constantinople, acknowledged and paid tribute to the Greek heritage of the empire. As Helen Evans, the Museum's Curator of Early Christian and Byzantine Art, puts it 1557 is an appropriate end date for this show if 'we want to see it from the point of Constantinople in the years after the fall when the memory of the empire as a real state is still "alive" and has not yet entered the sphere of the myth'.

The exhibition brings together an ambitious number of objects--more than 350, on loan from twenty-five countries, a huge achievement given that more than eighty per cent of these masterpieces have never before been exhibited outside the museums or monasteries in which they are housed. Displayed over twelve rooms in an artificially lit, ample space, in a non suffocating manner, they offer the public not only a true feast for the eyes but also a unique opportunity to familiarize itself with the last phase of Byzantium. This is the greatest advertisement that late and post-Byzantine art has ever enjoyed and it will remain unsurpassed for many decades to come.

Liturgical objects, manuscripts, frescoes and icons hold centre stage--with the last predominant. They are all integral parts of church interiors and of the Orthodox liturgy and private devotion. The Triumph of Orthodoxy, from the British Museum, reflects the importance that the icon of all icons, the Virgin Hodegetria, had acquired in the late Byzantine period. The Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia, a miniature mosaic icon from Dumbarton Oaks, is a stunning example of Palaiologan art and style (and one of my personal favourites). The realistic anatomical depiction of the men is unusual for Byzantine art, but the crowded scene, with the varied poses of the martyrs that convey their emotions and their suffering, is typical of the period. The use of icons for private devotion such as The Man of Sorrows, from S Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome, is explicitly demonstrated in The Dormition of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (Byzantine Museum, Athens), where an icon of the type is placed on the body of the dead saint, seen lying in the foreground.

A number of the examples on display reflect the interaction and mutual influence between late Byzantium and the world around it--Italy, Northern Europe and the Islamic kingdoms. The triptych with the Virgin and Child and Saints (private collection, London) is representative of the hybrid style developed on Crete, which was under Venetian domination from 1211 onwards and never returned to the Byzantine Empire. Its central panel depicts the Madre della Consolazione, a type of the Virgin and Child developed by Cretan painters, the left wing the embracing of Peter and Paul, a favoured Byzantine subject, and the right wing two western deacons. It perfectly reflects, therefore, the cross-cultural demands that the mixed Cretan clientele placed upon its painters. Equally exquisite examples of cultural interaction can be seen in the icons from the Holy Monastery of St Catherine at Sinai, displayed in a room designed to evoke the nave of its church. A number of the exhibits are referred to as 'Crusader' icons in the literature, because their production involved both Byzantine and western artists who created a style with an individual character during the period in which the crusaders ruled the Middle East. (1) The influence that the Byzantine icons of the Virgin exercised on Flemish artists is also demonstrated with some fine examples of their adaptation of the subject, such as Hayne of Brussels's Virgin and Child from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.