BYZANTIUM 330-1453 ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON
BYZANTIUM 330-1453 ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON This exhibition deals with the period between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, a period that is often called The Middle Ages, the Medieval Period or simply but not very informatively, ‘the Dark Ages’. During this time a major locus of civilisation was Byzantium and its formation from the Eastern half of the Roman Empire until its destruction by the Ottoman Turks is a story not of great, original innovations but of absolute uniformity and continuity. Essentially this was a period of retrenchment and austerity when many of the great gains of the Greek and Roman periods were consolidated but civilisation and therefore all the patterns of life including art and culture, remained essentially static. Perhaps that’s why a poet as WB Yeats writes several great poems about Byzantium, because it represents absolute perfection and utter stasis, possibly reflecting his own radical assortment of views albeit deployed in the