The Glory of Byzantium Icons to the left, icons to the right-and even a few mosaics around the corner A feast for the eye and soul at the Met
Elie, Paul
ART Paul Elie REVELATIONS ON DISPLAY 'The Glory of Byzantium' at the Met The 350 works in "The Glory of Byzantium" (at the Metropolitan Museum in New York through July 6) are like the tesserae...
...A clump of angels overlooks them from one side...
...An icon of the Annunciation is almost all gold...
...from the other, demons pull them toward the underworld...
...some of the icons had never left the monasteries before, and those drawn from Mount Athos (so it is said) had never before been seen by women...
...Paul Elie compiled A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints (Riverhead), and has written on art for Commonweal...
...Indeed, the works on display are striking in their realism and worldliness...
...It is as though the icons have been burnished by the monks' eyes...
...It shows a long line of disciples climbing a ladder pointed diagonally across the icon toward heaven...
...There are fairly straightforward portraits of Saints Nicholas and George, and an uncommonly passionate Virgin and Child, the Virgin's head tipped ever so slightly more toward the child than usual...
...If something is gained by seeing a tiled saint on his own and up close in a museum, something is lost because he has been separated from his fellows, and from the cosmic view of life embodied in tile in a Byzantine church...
...In Byzantium, it seems, the heavens are red or gold...
...Whereas the masters of the latter sought to make their art incarnational through the devices of visual realism (by employing perspective, say, or sculpture in the round), those of Orthodoxy, their hearts inclined to the risen Christ, developed spiritualized images of the Pantocrator and the saints...
...here and now, in their glass cases, poised as if held aloft by a squadron entering some pagan stronghold, they resemble battle axes...
...As I hastened through the last few rooms of the show just before closing time, a phalanx of guards tailing me, I wanted to hide behind an icon and stay all night...
...Lingering before a single icon for five minutes-a long time by museum standards-one is humbled by the thought that countless monks focused their devotional lives on the icon, gazing at it repeatedly and with deepening attention...
...Most of the objects, it seems, were made not just to be looked at but to be used in ritual or in everyday life: jewelry to be worn, reliquaries to be carried on the person, icons and amulets to be rubbed and kissed and passed around...
...So runs the conventional wisdom...
...The Glory of Byzantium" is devoted to the "Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D...
...whether they form a coherent and affecting image depends on where one stands to look at them...
...That is the period just after the Iconoclastic crisis, when the "restoration of images" by the Empress Theodora led to a profusion of religious art in the Orthodox world...
...Those of us who haven't visited Byzantium were spellbound...
...ART Paul Elie REVELATIONS ON DISPLAY 'The Glory of Byzantium' at the Met The 350 works in "The Glory of Byzantium" (at the Metropolitan Museum in New York through July 6) are like the tesserae of a mosaic...
...the two sides reflect the tension in medieval Christianity between maternal devotion and military ardor...
...The people who used these objects seem to have left something of themselves on them...
...in icons of the Transfiguration and the Raising of Lazarus, the sky is crimson...
...If the tesserae in the mosaic are petros, the rocks on which Christ built his church, in the church the mosaic can be seen as an image of the people gazing upon it...
...The icon is usable art par excellence, but in "The Glory of Byzantium" one feels the icons floating free, somewhat disconnected from the purposes for which they were made...
...As one enters, one comes upon a gallery full of iron processional crosses carried during the Crusades...
...What it cannot begin to do is convey the overwhelming, all-encompassing, awe-inspiring effects of Santa Sophia in Ravenna, where one stands in an environment transfigured in gold and colored glass...
...Byzantine art has long been seen as the contemplative, mystical "Mary" in contrast to the active "Martha" of Western Christian art...
...A fragment of a wall fresco from the Church of the Dormition in Greece shows Saints Cos-mas and Damian with their mother, Saint Theodata, who seems to glance up and out from a space deep inside herself like one of Vermeer's young girls, her sheer expressiveness overwhelming any symbolic scheme...
...and the warlike aspect of Christianity is suddenly plain to see...
...The people I know who have spent time in what was once Byzantium came away from the Met exhibition disappointed...
...Instead, the exhibit offers case after case of objects-jewelry, friezes, ivory reliquaries, crosses of hammered iron- as well as startling figures from mosaics (life-size or larger), and a selection of dozens of gorgeous icons...
...All that it does relentlessly...
...I suspect that this sense of purpose is what my friends felt missing from the exhibition...
...so too, the tiny apostles and angels carved into palm-size ivory reliquaries are remarkably round and solid...
...Or so I'm told...
...A double-sided icon, scuffed and peeling, combines two themes to powerful effect: a tender Virgin and Child is backed by a blood-red portrait of the military martyr, Saint James the Persian...
...In Byzantium, whether in a monastery, cathedral, or a village church, the art is not on the walls-it is the walls...
...843-1261...
...Whereas, in the museum a mosaic, however gorgeous, is just a mosaic...
...The icon is the only known representation of this image, and it makes clear how strange and subject to interpretation are some of the metaphors for Christian perfection-those ladders and stairways and castles that seem impossibly orderly now...
...For in these icons at least, red and gold are used as ground rather than for decoration...
...A portable icon of the Transfiguration is made of thousands of pieces of glass, some less than half a millimeter wide...
...A copper cross from the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, for example, has been rubbed so thoroughly in devotion that the rubbing seems part of the design...
...In the museum, even with quotations from the Greek Fathers stenciled on the walls, the objects on view seem, at times, little more than what Newman called "the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design...
...Most intriguing of all is the "Icon with the Heavenly Ladder of John Kli-max," from Saint Catherine's on Mount Sinai [below...
...The intensity of the ground gives the scenes high drama...
...In this room, the act of looking seems a profoundly physical act, as if one's gaze has been fused to countless others gathered into the icon...
...The Met exhibition complicates this view considerably...
...The play of light and shadow on the face of Saint Andrew, from a mosaic in Serres [see page 3], is rendered with a delicacy and subtlety that seem wonderfully gratuitous (a kind of art for art's sake), given that the nearest viewer would have stood in the apse fifty feet below...
...For the defining work of usable holy art is the church building itself, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Byzantium...
...The visual realism of the objects is complemented by their usefulness...
...The dozen icons on view here have been brought to New York from the monasteries of Mount Athos, Saint Catherine of Sinai, and Saint John on Patmos, as well as several museums...
...In the icon room, the difference between a devoted monk's act of looking and a museum-goer's is stark...
...The heart of the exhibition is the room full of breathtaking icons...
...The exhibition aims to reveal the variety of Byzantine art, the vast spread of Byzantine culture (into Egypt and Sicily, Spain and Bulgaria), the interaction of Orthodoxy and Islam, and the influence of Byzantium on the Latin West...
...The images on it of Christ, the Apostles, and Saint Theodore seem pressed into the metal by the kisses of generations of monks, left there by their small acts of love...
Vol. 124 • May 1997 • No. 10
