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 most conformist fashion:
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
The exhibition references Yeats, and its as if he’s already written into the fabric of Byzantium even though he died almost half a millennium after the destruction of the empire. At the beginning of the exhibition neat maps tell us the story of Byzantium, from its being the eastern part of Rome to its contraction, expansion and ultimate inert collapse. The texts gloss over the military or historical details, there's no mention, for instance, of Flavius Belisarius or of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard, created by Basil II, composed entirely of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Vikings like Harald Hardrada, who also fought for the Kievan Rus a foe of Byzantium positioned to the north and clear predecessors of modern Russians and also, much closer to home, against Harold the Saxon at Stamford Bridge. The focus is on the daily artifacts, coins, necklaces, bangles, crosses, crucifixes and the immense ikons that typify Byzantine art and encapsulate those things that it offered as a kind of legacy and other aspects of Byzantine culture that perhaps have been rightly forgotten. The Byzantines spoke Greek, not Latin, and were also prone to the practise of iconoclasm, the banning of representations of Jesus or of other aspects of The Gospels, a practice which has much in common with Islam’s banning of representations of Mohammed and the Prophets. The representation of Jesus is one key to the works presented here, firstly as the ‘man of sorrows’, then as an abstract, unindividuated ikon. These representations are also closely paralleled to the varieties of heresy and schism represented mainly by the schism that existed between east and west in this period that culminated in the sacking of Byzantium by the Crusaders in 1203 and its subsequent occupation until 1263 which marked the end of a workable relationship between east and west, a decisive historical moment. But there had been immense commercial and cultural cross-fertilisation before this and afterwards too and this is minutely detailed here.
Byzantine ikons are stark, abstract works where types are presented rather than individuals. There is very little attempt to offer images of living people and therefore these ikons are dark, powerful yet, it must be said, innately sterile works, that beg for further textures, bright colours or even more starkly effective contrasts and darknesses. Although it's undeniable that Byzantine art had immense technical limitations, it's still austerely magnificent, especially when simple contrasts of line, colour or material such as the encaustic (wax) and goldwork are presented as they are here in many different variants. Yet it's clear that late Roman/early Byzantine artists had fulfilled a competence which then seems to have been lost, or perhaps was lost deliberately under the pressures of iconoclasm. Byzantine makers of ikons never signed their works until very late in this period and all the things that make artists artists for us are clearly absent. The Byzantine artists anonymity, total lack of individualism, refutation of competitiion in favour of the communal function of the artist, not depicting individuals but types, lack of a desire for fame or renown and all the various hallmarks of the world of bourgeois individualism that came into being after the European Renaissance, really marks them out as inhabiting a world entirely different in form and content from our own. In many ways Byzantine makers of ikons represent or seem very like film-workers in Hollywood, struggling to create 'art' in the context of dreary and multifold limitations, yet somehow managing to create ikons that represent fervour, creativity and, above all, a multiverse world implicit yet absent in Byzantium.
Paul Murphy, 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 most conformist fashion:
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
The exhibition references Yeats, and its as if he’s already written into the fabric of Byzantium even though he died almost half a millennium after the destruction of the empire. At the beginning of the exhibition neat maps tell us the story of Byzantium, from its being the eastern part of Rome to its contraction, expansion and ultimate inert collapse. The texts gloss over the military or historical details, there's no mention, for instance, of Flavius Belisarius or of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard, created by Basil II, composed entirely of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Vikings like Harald Hardrada, who also fought for the Kievan Rus a foe of Byzantium positioned to the north and clear predecessors of modern Russians and also, much closer to home, against Harold the Saxon at Stamford Bridge. The focus is on the daily artifacts, coins, necklaces, bangles, crosses, crucifixes and the immense ikons that typify Byzantine art and encapsulate those things that it offered as a kind of legacy and other aspects of Byzantine culture that perhaps have been rightly forgotten. The Byzantines spoke Greek, not Latin, and were also prone to the practise of iconoclasm, the banning of representations of Jesus or of other aspects of The Gospels, a practice which has much in common with Islam’s banning of representations of Mohammed and the Prophets. The representation of Jesus is one key to the works presented here, firstly as the ‘man of sorrows’, then as an abstract, unindividuated ikon. These representations are also closely paralleled to the varieties of heresy and schism represented mainly by the schism that existed between east and west in this period that culminated in the sacking of Byzantium by the Crusaders in 1203 and its subsequent occupation until 1263 which marked the end of a workable relationship between east and west, a decisive historical moment. But there had been immense commercial and cultural cross-fertilisation before this and afterwards too and this is minutely detailed here.
Byzantine ikons are stark, abstract works where types are presented rather than individuals. There is very little attempt to offer images of living people and therefore these ikons are dark, powerful yet, it must be said, innately sterile works, that beg for further textures, bright colours or even more starkly effective contrasts and darknesses. Although it's undeniable that Byzantine art had immense technical limitations, it's still austerely magnificent, especially when simple contrasts of line, colour or material such as the encaustic (wax) and goldwork are presented as they are here in many different variants. Yet it's clear that late Roman/early Byzantine artists had fulfilled a competence which then seems to have been lost, or perhaps was lost deliberately under the pressures of iconoclasm. Byzantine makers of ikons never signed their works until very late in this period and all the things that make artists artists for us are clearly absent. The Byzantine artists anonymity, total lack of individualism, refutation of competitiion in favour of the communal function of the artist, not depicting individuals but types, lack of a desire for fame or renown and all the various hallmarks of the world of bourgeois individualism that came into being after the European Renaissance, really marks them out as inhabiting a world entirely different in form and content from our own. In many ways Byzantine makers of ikons represent or seem very like film-workers in Hollywood, struggling to create 'art' in the context of dreary and multifold limitations, yet somehow managing to create ikons that represent fervour, creativity and, above all, a multiverse world implicit yet absent in Byzantium.
Paul Murphy, Royal Academy, London
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