Serbian Orthodox Church

Information Service of
the Serbian Orthodox Church
April 19, 2004

The Glory of Byzantium

The New York Times
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group
The magazine "Gloria"

THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/arts/design/22BYZA.html

ARTS
March 22, 2004

Glittering Trove Built on Trust Across Borders
By CAROL VOGEL

As Helen C. Evans was putting together "The Glory of Byzantium, A.D.
843-1261," the sumptuous exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in 1997 and attracted a staggering 460,854 visitors, she
was already planning a sequel. Ms. Evans, the museum's curator of early
Christian and Byzantine art, knew there was more to be told.

"The last big centuries of Byzantium have never been explored in an
exhibition," Ms. Evans said. "And they're by far the most important
because they represent the empire at its peak."

So for seven years Ms. Evans and Mahrukh Tarapor, the museum's associate director for exhibitions, traveled to places few would dare, organizing "Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)," a feat of international diplomacy that opens at the Met tomorrow and runs through July 4.

Byzantium, the name given to both the state and the culture of the
Eastern Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, saw a great artistic
outpouring. "Byzantium Faith and Power" begins in 1261, when the capital
Constantinople (now Istanbul) was restored to imperial rule after its
sacking by the Crusaders. It concludes in 1557, when the empire that had
fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was renamed Byzantium, the name by
which it is still known.

The art and objects of that era, produced primarily for the Orthodox
Church - sacred painted icons, lavishly embroidered silk textiles,
richly gilded metalwork, illuminated manuscripts, delicate
micromosaics - illustrate the artistic treasures that have come to
define Byzantium.

The show is the last of a grand trilogy. In 1977 Ms. Evans organized
"The Age of Spirituality," which dealt with Christian art between the
third and eighth centuries A.D., followed by "The Glory of Byzantium" in
1997.

Less than 10 percent of the art and objects presented in "Byzantium:
Faith and Power" had ever left their home countries, the curators said.
While negotiating these loans Ms. Evans and Ms. Tarapor visited 35
countries. They spent days waiting to be summoned by archbishops of the
Orthodox Church, went mountain climbing with monks at midnight and
pressed their case with political figures.

Their wish list included 14th- and 15th-century icons and richly
illustrated manuscripts, miniature mosaics created in court ateliers of
Constantinople and elaborately embroidered religious vestments of silk,
gold and gems, each a priceless example of cultural heritage.

Despite a political landscape altered drastically by the events of Sept.
11, 2001, the curators were able to gather some 350 examples of
Byzantine art from about 30 nations, including Greece, Bulgaria, Egypt,
France, Italy, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Serbia and Montenegro and
Macedonia.

Ms. Tarapor said that she and Ms. Evans were "affected by world events
even before September 11th" and noted that with "any political event,
whether small or large, we would feel the tremors."

"We were dealing with a living faith and a glorious culture," Ms.
Tarapor added. "But at the same time the cultures we were trying to
display were in ruins."

Because of the war in Kosovo, she and Ms. Evans had to postpone
traveling to Serbia. Eventually Slobodan Curcic, a professor in the
department of art and archaeology at Princeton University, took them to
Belgrade, the Serbian capital. "I'd never seen the effects of a real
bombing," Ms. Tarapor said. "It was a shock and very sobering."

One place that resisted their entreaties was Mount Athos, an ancient
community of 20 monasteries on a rocky peninsula in northern Greece.
Since women were not allowed there, "we would go to the border and a
priest would come down to have lunch with us," Ms. Tarapor said. "We'd
talk." They had no luck because the monastery has been hesitant to lend
since the start of the war in Iraq. Still, they managed to get important
loans of art and objects that originally came from Mount Athos but were
now in other collections.

"It was all about trust," Ms. Tarapor said of getting monasteries to
part with portions of their collections. And sometimes about giving them
a little help. The Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, on the Sinai
Peninsula in Egypt, had lent 10 works for the 1997 show. This time it
has contributed 43 objects.

In exchange the museum helped design a new sacristy area, which is being
paid for by some of the exhibition's donors. Now the monastery, which
draws many tourists, will be able to preserve its treasures and display
them with greater security. The museum also published a book of
photographic essays, with royalties going to St. Catherine's.

Museum officials would not say exactly how much this exhibition cost.
But people inside the museum said it was close to $4 million, nearly $1
million more than "The Glory of Byzantium," making it one of the most
expensive shows in the Met's history. It has financing from the Arts and
Artifacts Indemnity program, as well as support from the National
Endowment for the Arts. The show also has Greek and Cypriot sponsors:
Alpha Bank, the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation, the A. G. Leventis
Foundation and the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation.

To ensure the safe travel of many treasures in the show, conservators
from the Met designed climate-controlled cases in New York and then
traveled to places like the Sinai Desert with the proper crates and
packing materials.

Installing the show was a bit like running the United Nations. For days
before the opening the first gallery became a staging area for
inspecting objects as they were being unpacked. Throughout the galleries
languages from around the globe could be heard.

One object of which Ms. Evans is particularly proud is the "Holy Face of
Laon," a 13th-century cedar panel with the face of Jesus on it from the
Laon Cathedral in Northern France. The state turned down a request from
the Vatican when it tried to borrow it four years ago. "We worked with
priests and with the French government," Ms. Evans said. "Eighteen
people attended the packing, including the local bishop and every
government and church official."

Icons borrowed from the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine are shown in a
gallery designed to evoke the nave of the church there, built in the
sixth century by the Emperor Justinian. Forty-three icons are hung in
groups in the gallery as they are hung on rails in the original church.
A nearby gallery contains a stunning collection of micromosaics, the
tiniest mosaics set in beeswax. "They are the greatest art form of the
late Byzantine," Ms. Evans said, noting that few survive. The exhibition
is rich in gold-ground painted icons. In the gallery of works from St.
Catherine is a large diptych that shows St. Prokopios and the Virgin
Kykkotissa. Above her is the image of the Virgin in the burning bush.
There is also a monumental pair of full-length figures of two saints,
Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom, from around 1408. The icons
were borrowed from the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.

The show also has rooms of richly embroidered textiles and objects, like
a giant copper chandelier, or choros, that frequently hung in
late-Byzantine churches. Vitrines contain elaborate, illuminated
manuscripts and fresco decorations.

One would think the topic had now been well explored, but Ms. Evans is
already busy planning her next big exhibition. "Hopefully it will be
about the myth of Byzantium," she said. "I'd like to call it `Sailing to
Byzantium,' after the Yeats poem. We've spent the past two exhibitions
making the empire real. Now I would like to explore the romantic vision
and why we think of it as a fairy tale."

Metropolitan Museum Byzantium: Faith and Power

Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557)
March 23, 2004–July 4, 2004
Special Exhibition Galleries, The Tisch Galleries, 2nd floor

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={9A19B99B-ECDE-4EF0-A021-01168C413561}&HomePageLink=special_c2b

The third exhibition in a chronological series devoted to the art and influence of Byzantine civilization, this major international loan exhibition demonstrates the artistic and cultural significance of the last centuries of the state that called itself “the Empire of the Romans.” The exhibition begins in 1261, when the capital Constantinople was restored to imperial rule, and concludes in 1557, when the empire that had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was renamed Byzantium—the name by which it is still known today. The importance of the era is primarily demonstrated through the arts created for the Orthodox church and for the churches of other East Christian states that aspired to be the heirs to the empire’s power. The impact of its culture on the Islamic world and the Latin-speaking West is also explored—especially the influence of the Christian East on the development of the Renaissance.
Accompanied by a catalogue.

In connection with the exhibition, a major symposium on "Byzantium: Faith and Power" will be held at the Metropolitan Museum from Friday, April 16, to Sunday, April 18. The event will include scholarly presentations and a concluding performance. For more information, call 212-570-3710 or email lectures@metmuseum.org.

The exhibition is made possible by Alpha Bank.

Sponsorship is also provided by the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation, the A. G. Leventis Foundation and the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation.

Additional support has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2535873

The art of Byzantium
Glories of gold
Mar 25th 2004
From The Economist print edition

Byzantium's icon painters were the Mel Gibsons of their day—and more

NEW YORKERS are assaulted by thousands of images every day. In recent days, scenes from the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ—all of them images designed to make people think harder about the relationship between spiritual authority and earthly power—have had an unaccustomed impact.

Thus far, at least, we might be speaking of Mel Gibson's blockbuster film, “The Passion of The Christ”—or of another, rather more rarefied event that will nonetheless make a deep impression on American consumers of high culture: the opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of a wonderfully rich selection of the artistic and spiritual achievements of late Christian Byzantium, and its imitators in the Slavic world.

Inevitably, comparisons will be made. For better or worse, Mr Gibson's film is probably the most ambitious attempt to recreate on film the 2,000-year-old story in whose light more than a billion people alive today believe themselves to be living. At least in theory, every drop of historical knowledge and technology available to a modern cinematographer has been deployed to make the film as “realistic” as possible, in terms of landscape, architecture and even language.

The icons, manuscripts, embroidered vestments and other religious objects on show at the Met do not set out to achieve that sort of verisimilitude. But they are among the supreme achievements of another era's effort to describe the same narrative through an entirely different medium, that of formal sacred art oriconography.

Is there really such a difference? Mr Gibson's film company is called Icon Film Distribution, and its logo is one of Russia's most beloved sacred images, the tender, mournful depiction of Mary known as the Vladimir Mother of God. But as visitors to the Met—regardless of their religious affiliation—will almost certainly notice, the Byzantine iconographers' Christ is very far from that of Mr Gibson, in spirit as well as detail. The film's most powerful images are—to put it mildly—somewhat one-dimensional: they show a man enduring torture and abasement at the limits of human endurance, for a reason which a person unfamiliar with the story would find hard to discern. Presumably, the untutored viewer might conclude that the hero was a gifted preacher who had somehow incurred the wrath of his rulers; but it would still be hard to work out what the point of the story was.

The Byzantine Christ, by contrast, never ceases to be many different things at once: divine and human, humiliated and victorious, wounded and healing. Even at the darkest moments of the Passion story, the dawn is already present. Even when Christ is at his most humble and abased, he never ceases to be the Word of God made flesh.

The conventions of icon-painting, on which individual artists could make only slight (but often brilliant) variations, are designed with these very paradoxes in mind. Grief and pain are expressed with restraint, not self-indulgence; joy and sorrow, abasement and victory, the transient and the eternal are endlessly combined.

One of the most astonishing images on show at the Met is a virtually monochrome Christ, borrowed from Russia but originating from somewhere in the Balkans, in which the eyes are closed and the body hunched in a pose of Munch-like intensity: it is full of cosmic, rather than individual, pain and there is not a hint of the narcissism which Mr Gibson's Christ often seems to display. The title, bestowed without irony, is the “King of Glory”.

As their makers conceived them, these icons are not decorations, photographs or historical records: they are windows on to heaven through which the believer can enter a higher reality. Even as nails pierce his hands, the Christ of Byzantine icons is still God incarnate, surrounded by a golden halo which glows even brighter as the conquest of death itself is accomplished. Blood flows from his side in a stylised stream, bringing life and healing to the stony hill below.

In iconography, moreover, the Cross itself, with its T-shaped elongated arms, is not so much a literal depiction of the Roman empire's preferred instrument of torture: it is a benign kind of tree, with echoes of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, whose branches reach out in a gesture of protection and healing to the human race.

Precisely the same sort of paradox is elaborated, over and over again, in the liturgical poetry of the eastern Church: this is not just a man suffering, but the Creator himself entering the darkest moments of the human experience and hence redeeming them. When Mary Magdalene speaks to Christ, it is not simply a friend she addresses but her God: “Accept the fountain of my tears, O Thou who drawest down from the clouds the waters of the sea.” When Christ is laid in the tomb, he is attended by adoring angels; they at least know that he has never ceased to be God.

More than 350 objects—icons, manuscripts, vestments and other gorgeously embroidered fabrics—have been gathered together, including 40 from St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai and several from Kosovo where more than a dozen churches were destroyed last week. This, the third and last in a series of shows that the Met has devoted to the empire of Byzantium, tries to recreate the so-called Byzantine commonwealth as it existed before and after the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Was it the twilight of Christian Constantinople, then? No, insists Helen Evans, who curated the exhibition. What she is trying to show is that even as Constantinople's territory shrank to a small patch of land outside the city, its artistic and spiritual power continue to pulsate like a beacon throughout the eastern half of Christendom.

The Serbs, Bulgarians and above all the Russians had no wish to live under the political sway of a Greek-speaking empire; but they acknowledged Constantinople's authority in matters of art and theology by reproducing and developing the models which had first been made on the shores of the Bosphorus.

After the Ottoman Turkish triumph of 1453, the Greek patriarchate's authority over the new empire's Christian subjects was left intact and in some ways broadened—but its claim to be the main spiritual centre of Orthodoxy (and also to be the heir of at least one part of the Roman empire) was challenged by Moscow.

As the exhibition shows, the battle within eastern Christendom for the mantle of spiritual and secular power was at times a ruthless affair; in these wars the humility of God-incarnate hanging on the Cross can be very hard to discern. But even as the would-be rulers of earthly kingdoms did battle, the artists they commissioned—often for reasons that were closely connected with earthly power struggles—had a deep sense of the spiritual struggle at the heart of their faith; and they portrayed it in a more subtle way than cinema has so far managed to do.

An article by Maјa Herman-Sekulic was published in the magazine "Gloria" on April 14, 2004 regarding an exceptionally successful exhibition in New York City

Spring in New York City

BYZANTIUM ON FIFTH AVENUE

"At the end of March the third exhibition in a series was opened in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City dedicated to Byzantine art called "Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)". Since then the museum building on Fifth Avenue has flown the flag of Byzantium and the exhibition has marked the coming of spring to New York City. For the first time more than 350 masterpieces have been collected from 30 countries of Europe and Asia in one place. Much space has been given to works from our region: fragments of frescoes and items such as silver coins from the time of the Serbian Emperors Dusan and Uros, the sarcophagus of King Stefan Uros III from Decani Monastery, the sculpture of the Mother of God with Child from Sokolica Monastery in Kosovo, a gorgeous stone rosetta, the ring of the Empress Theodora, the chalice of Stefan Uros IV, the Emperor Dusan from the National Museum and icons from Ochrid.

In the words of the director of the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and its realization would have been impossible without close cooperation with institutions such as the Museum of the Patriarchate and the National Museum in Belgrade. Many of the artifacts left the monasteries and countries where they originate for the first time. In honor of this exhibition exceptionally beautiful copies of Byzantine jewelry were also prepared in India from emeralds, pearls and rubies in 24-carat gold.

To this we must add: Spring has come to New York City with the breath of Byzantium. In our part of the world, where many of the exponents on display originate, spring began with the smoke and flames of torched holy shrines and the houses of the descendants of those who created this beauty.