London,

Byzantium 330-1453

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Royal Academy Of Arts
Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1J 0BD

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Description: A chronological look at artistic development in the Byzantine Empire, featuring icons, paintings, mosaics, enamels and metalwork.

Phone: 0207300 8000
Website: www.royalacademy.org.uk

Trains: Tube: Green Park/Piccadilly Circus , Tube / Bus: 9, 14, 19, 22, 38,

Opening hours: Mon-Sun 10am-6pm (Fri until 10pm)

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Relics of a Golden Empire in Byzantium 330-1453

 

Dragon-slayer: an early 15th-century icon of St Theodore influenced by Italian Renaissance depictions of St George

Pearly queen: a very beautiful funeral portrait from a coffin, typical of Roman Egypt; nothing whatever to do with Byzantium, it dates from the first century AD

Striking: Christ Pantokrator — that is a full-frontal pseudo-portrait — dating from 1370-80 and typical of such images in Constantinople and Thessaloniki

Poor thing: a very late bronze head of Constantine, excavated in Serbia

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The Royal Academy’s winter exhibition is this year devoted to the cultural artefacts of Byzantium, the empire that was the ancient Rome of the east and for more than a millennium the Christian successor of the pagan western Rome. Its capital, too, was called Byzantium, its prime defensive site on the west side of the Bosphorus, a prehistoric settlement turned city in the seventh century BC, then, in succession, a Persian satrapy, an ally to the Athenians and finally Rome’s supporter in her eastern wars. Turning against Rome in the late second century AD, the city was besieged for more than two years by the Emperor Septimius Severus, ruthlessly sacked and all but destroyed. By the year 330 AD, however, Constantine the Great, the most outstanding imperial builder in the history of the eastern Roman Empire, driven by a zeal that matched his determination to impose Christianity as its official religion — which, that year, he did — had rebuilt and expanded the city in splendour and extent far beyond its earlier walls.

The art and artefacts of Christian Byzantium — or Constantinople, as it had become — and its empire from 330 until it fell to the Turks in 1453, provide the Academy with far more than it can chew and, at the same time, far less. Imagine an exhibition there covering the same period in western Europe and the same geographical extent: it is unthinkable, and were it thought, it would be nonsense. In the beginning of this long period this second, this new, this eastern Rome was still part of a very Roman Roman Empire that included England, France and Spain, reached into Germany and beyond the Alps and Bucharest, and was bordered by the Danube. By a long halfway through the sixth century the joint Empire had, but for southern Spain, lost its northern and western holdings, its north African footholds were considerably reduced and its once great Roman half extinguished. By 800AD, Byzantium held only Sicily, toeholds in Italy and Greece, part of Thrace to the west of Constantinople, and in Asia, only most of Anatolia; without the Levant, the Bible lands and Egypt, it bore scant resemblance to the Roman Empire ruled by the great Caesars of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. As William the Conqueror was taking England for the Normans, Byzantium peaked once more with conquests in the Balkans, but slowly the Empire shrank again, partly through the incursion of other Normans in search of kingdoms for themselves; when the Turks extinguished Byzantium in 1453 they had nothing more to conquer than the city itself, Thessaloniki 500 kilometres to the west and two toeholds in southern Greece.

For me, it has taken a lifetime to acquire only a nodding acquaintance with Byzantine art and architecture; I have spent months in Istanbul, Cappadocia, Turkish Armenia and Cyprus, and many days in Ochrid, Thessaloniki, Trebizond, Monreale and Ravenna, and still count myself as largely ignorant. How can the Academy claim, with only some 320 exhibits — small icons, small carvings, coins, ecclesiastical plate, embroidery, caskets, reliquaries, manuscripts and the trivia of toys, clothes, ­jewellery, spoons and clumsy peasant pottery — to offer a didactic introduction to the art of a thousand years spread over a thousand thousand miles of ­territory? This is as Alice-in-­Wonderland a proposal as gossiping of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, cabbages and kings.

There is, of course, the easy argument that Byzantine art is so fixed in formula, so hieratic in purpose and intent, that there is not much change from place to place or century to century, and at first ignorant glance this seems to be the case, but within each pocket of the Empire there is clear evidence of the development of a local school affected by local factors and contiguous, even alien, cultures. The sane man does not need to be an expert to recognise the difference, in Cyprus for example, between an ikon of c.1000 and another of c.1400 even though the image is common, or, in Cappadocia, the difference between a wall-painting of c.600 and another of c.1000 — there, in very late churches excavated from the rock by pockets of Christian Greeks in the later 19th century, the imagery remained largely unchanged over a millennium, an appalling decline in quality the first clue in arriving at a date.

As with ancient Roman art, the iconography mattered far more than any interest in the quality of representation. In late Roman sculpture, copied from copies and a thousand times removed from the original, there is no quality in the grotesque and disproportionate figures of any scale — they are a record of decline in technical ability and the total absence of renewal through observation and enquiry. In Byzantine art, quality lay primarily in the richness of materials, costly extravagance far outweighing aesthetic impulse; the visitor will find nothing in this exhibition with even a hint of the spiritual inspiration and intellectual enquiry of Duccio’s Sienese Maestà, or Giotto’s Paduan frescos, narrative works of invention and advance of which no Byzantine craftsman was remotely capable. It is as though every Byzantine image was not to inform but to be venerated as a substitute for Christ or patron saint, as though it could work the miracle, and that veneration was compelled, not by love and adoration, but by the balefully disagreeable expressions of these holy figures, their thaumaturgical effect vested in the fear, awe and apprehension that they instilled, as well as in their cost.

This is not an exhibition for the faint-hearted — indeed, I must go further and suggest that unless the visitor can bring to it some serious experience of Byzantine art, either through scholarship or through recreational travel in Venice, Ravenna, Monreale, Thessaloniki, Cyprus, Istanbul, Trebizond, Ochrid, the southern Balkans and scattered throughout Greece, it will seem no more than a bewildering confusion of miscellaneous small things, conveying nothing of the awe-inspiring quality and splendour of Byzantine art in situ in Byzantine buildings in the far-flung vastness of all that was once known as Byzantium. It is all very well for the Academy to claim that it is a “ground-breaking”, even an “epic” exhibition, to claim that it is the first for half a century, to reel off a list of treasuries to which few have ever been, to publish commendations from the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister (lawks ’a mercy), but my response is that it is an exhibition by curators for other curators in the field, and that the rest of us will be, if we expected to learn anything of Byzantine art and not just gaze in ignorant awe, disappointed and perplexed.

Yet again I commend the catalogue as the best thing in the show. It should be read before even thinking of a visit. It has five maps of the Byzantine Empire within the period of 330-1453 but the sixth, demonstrating the shrivelled core of it in its dying year, is not included. It has a useful, though too perfunctory, chronology. Its mercifully concise essays expertly introduce the exhibition’s various sections, and the catalogue entries on each exhibit are essential reading, though the three sizes of font employed are the three tiniest on the ophthalmologist’s test card. Its paperback price is £27.95.

Do not expect to do the old-fashioned thing of walking round the exhibition with the catalogue in hand — it weighs a wrist-breaking couple of kilos and is an insupportably floppy 48 centimetres across when open; as the exhibition’s presentation is one of fashionable gloom, reading the curators’ helpful entries while contemplating the exhibits is simply not possible. In addition to the darkness, everything else that could be done to make things difficult for the visitor has been done. Minimal information about exhibits is engraved on wide shiny plates of white metal that run the width of cases and vitrines, canted so that reflected light blinds the hopeful reader — whose mad idea was that and who among academicians gave it approval? Ikons meant to be seen from both sides are lit from only one. Manuscripts are impossible to read, and the detail, even the subjects, of small ikons displayed in cases are impossible to discern. Almost everything is easier to examine in the catalogue. All daylight is excluded, and quite unnecessarily, the Academy has shut off rooms that could have been devoted to light-sensitive exhibits — manuscripts and textiles, for example — letting natural light fall in other rooms on paintings and exhibits made of stone and metal. Extra rooms should have been used to ease the cramped display and the crush of visitors.

The exhibition is on view until 22 March next year — unusually long. Were I the Academy’s president, I’d close it for a week, let daylight in, rid it of designers’ follies, reach into closed rooms with it, and let it breathe, for the conditions in which we see these things at the Academy are generally far worse than in the museums and collections lending them. And if this exhibition is in any way intended to benefit students, then the £8 that they are charged should be handsomely reduced — indeed, I wonder why no sponsor has yet thought of subsidising ticket prices instead of paying exhibition designers to realise their foolish fantasies. Exhibitions are adjuncts of education, not the theatre.

The wow factor of Byzantine art and architecture in situ is overwhelming, whether the setting is vast and magnificent, as in Santa Sophia in Istanbul, or some tiny painted church in Cappadocia, hewn from the rock by St Basil’s anchorites — but there is no wow in the Royal Academy. A handful of exquisite things — fine ivory diptychs and other reliefs (Nos 13-18, 21-25 and 65-78), the hieratic enamel ikon of St Michael made in Constantinople in the 12th century (No 58) and the Lectionary of the same place and period, open at a page that is an extreme contrast in its rare realism (No 61), the micromosaic of the 12 most important feasts of the Byzantine liturgy (No 227), Marshal Oshin’s Gospels (No 298) and the gilded silver book covers probably made for gospels c.1000 (No 82) — all reassure the visitor but these are small in scale, offer scant hints of greater grandeur, and their quality is undermined by the examples of crude rubbish that are presented as masterpieces of pottery (look at these and then recall what was being produced in contemporary China).

My fear is that this dismal exhibition will, far from encouraging visitors to hie themselves off on vacations in Byzantium, deter them from ever thinking of it. “Epic”. Epic, my foot.

Byzantium 330-1453 is at the Royal Academy (0870 848 8484,
www.royalacademy.org.uk) until
22 March 2009. Daily 10am-5.30pm (Friday 10am-9.30pm).
Admission £12, concessions available.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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