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The aesthetics of Orthodox faith.
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2005 by Sharon E.J. Gerstel
One of the greatest challenges of launching such an ambitious exhibition lay in presenting complex material to a wide range of audiences. The first step entailed collecting and installing hundreds of works; the second, displaying the works in a meaningful way. Discussions with visitors to the exhibition revealed that many could not grasp the underlying meaning of the show; indeed, a number commented that it simply contained too many works. Rather than appreciating developments in certain types of icons, many viewers saw the duplication of images as repetitious. In the absence of interpretative materials, some found the show too difficult and left the galleries in search of displays of more familiar (and comfortable?) works. From the standpoint of an academic whose research and teaching focus on the period under consideration, the disjunction between the way in which Late Byzantine art was presented in the show and the manner in which it is taught in the classroom was disheartening. A quick survey of graduate courses on Late Byzantine art offered in the United States over the last five years discloses that most are organized thematically, by medium, or by city; a large number address issues of cross-cultural interaction through trade, gift exchange, or as the result of war and subsequent cohabitation. I could not find a single seminar that explicitly addressed the aesthetics of Late Byzantine art. Ambitious exhibitions like this one extend an opportunity to educate the public. Unfortunately, many in the field viewed this as an opportunity lost.
The exhibition's lavish 658-page catalog, produced for a scholarly audience, contains seventeen thematic essays of varying length as well as entries for each of the exhibited works. The authors include senior scholars in the field, museum curators, and an archbishop, along with several younger scholars who worked as part of the exhibition team. More than one hundred authors, many of them associated with lending institutions, composed the catalog entries. As mentioned above, the divisions of the catalog do not correspond to the placement of objects in the exhibition, and some catalog entries differ with the museum's labels.
The first essay, authored by the principal curator, Helen C. Evans, serves as a general introduction. Here, Evans explains the chronological boundaries of the exhibition, identifies major artistic centers, and gives a brief summation of the history of the period as well as some information about Byzantium's interactions with neighboring cultures. In the next essay, Alice-Mary Talbot introduces translated texts from the period in order to illuminate the place of Constantinople and the impact of its fall on its citizens. These two essays are followed by entries describing the works bearing portraits of the Byzantines and their neighbors. Rulers from Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania are represented in the first gallery of the exhibition, yet the catalog does not adequately address the origin and rise of these sibling states, which were frequently at odds with Byzantium.
