Upfront

By Hugh Pearman

Its tempestuous former exhibitions supremo Sir Norman Rosenthal may have finally left the building, but his spirit lives on in a show which was presumably devised on his watch. Its aim is nothing less than to define the art of a 1000-year empire. It does this with just 300 objects. Byzantium, however, was much more than an empire, if perhaps less than a complete civilisation. It was and is to some extent a state of mind. Today it represents a notion of a glamorous, cultured, powerful yet somehow non-threatening Middle East – for all that the period in question included those massive and oft-repeated errors of judgement known as the Crusades.

‘Byzantium’ is so much less loaded a title than ‘Holy Roman Empire’ which is the name I was taught at school, when we were expected to cheer the fact that Christian emperors helped keep the devilish Islamic hordes in check. We now know that there was more than one kind of civilisation on offer during the period in question, and that ‘civilised’ behaviour was not necessarily the preserve of our gallant knights, who mostly turned out to be shabby atrocity-mongering mercenaries who would kill Christian and Muslim alike. So what kind of Byzantium does the RA offer us?

This is one of those exhibitions that mixes chronology with theming. In this case it does so by selecting what its curators regard as the main characteristics of six periods of history: the origins of Byzantium with the foundation of Constantinople in 330 AD; the rise to prominence of that great city; the artistic retrenchment when Christian figurative art was banned; the post-iconoclast revival; the glorious artistic flowering of the Middle Ages (the ‘dark ages’) and the connections between late Byzantine art and the early Western Renaissance – for instance, through the medium of great trading centres such as Venice, which acted as a melting-pot of Mediterranean cultures.

What we are looking at here is art of remarkable diversity from a very widespread area: icons from Russia and Crete, wall paintings, micro-mosaics, ivories, enamels, and of course the gold and silver metalwork that we associate with the period. The Treasury of San Marco in Venice, for instance, has been comprehensively ransacked for this show. Plus we have the object that was regarded by some as the actual Holy Grail following its discovery in 1911; the silver gilt Antioch Chalice from around 500 AD. It seems that wishful thinking with regard to supposedly sacred objects did not die out with the Middle Ages: these days the chalice is generally regarded as a piece of standard church equipment from the time.

It’s not all bling, though: we also have such rarities as the ‘Homilies of Monk James Kokkinobaphos’ which is a manuscript from the early 12th century on loan from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. What the RA is trying to do is to summon up the atmosphere of Byzantium – which politically was a squirming, constantly shifting organism – through its art. This is a hard thing to describe, though you know it when you encounter it. The RA describes it thus: ‘The art emits an intellectual, emotional and spiritual energy, yet is distinctive for the expression of passionate belief and high emotion within an art of moderation and restraint.’ What they mean is: this is highly-charged Christian art.

So, for those of you shaky on world history, this is the cultural output of the period between the ‘real’ pre-Christian Roman Empire and the later, Ottoman Empire following the fall of Constantinople in 1453. For most of its history, Byzantium extended from southern Italy through Greece to include what we now know of as Turkey and other Middle Eastern nations. Asia and North Africa also played a part. It covers one of the more turbulent millenniums that humanity has to offer, taking place along what can only be described as a permanent religious and cultural fault line. The old axiom applies: interesting times produce interesting art. Christian it may be: but it is anything but Western.