Exhibition: BYZANTIUM 330-1453 at the Royal Academy of Arts
From 25 October 2008 – 22 March 2009, the Royal Academy of Arts will host a ground-breaking exhibition devoted to Byzantium. Highlighting the splendours of the Byzantine Empire, the exhibition will comprise around 300 objects including icons, detached wall paintings, micro-mosaics, ivories, enamels plus gold and silver metalwork. Some of the works have never been displayed in public before. Byzantium 330–1453 will include great works from the San Marco Treasury in Venice and rare items from collections across Europe, the USA, Russia, Ukraine and Egypt.
The exhibition begins with the foundation of Constantinople in 330 AD by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great and concludes with the capture of the city by the Ottoman forces of Mehmed II in 1453. This will be the first major exhibition on Byzantine Art in the United Kingdom for 50 years.
This epic exhibition has been made possible through a collaboration between the Royal Academy of Arts and the Benaki Museum, Athens.
A traveler’s thoughts on Egypt Sinai Desert
I had come to Egypt to visit St Catherine’s on the Sinai peninsula, which has kept its sacred traditions unbroken since the early 6th century, when the great builder Justinian constructed it from huge hunks of granite around a chapel marking the spot where Moses had seen the burning bush.
Here, in preparation for the magnificent Byzantium exhibition, which opens at the Royal Academy next week, I passed two days like a lizard in a rocky desert fissure. I gazed at the earliest surviving icon image of Christ’s face, pored over manuscripts in the world’s oldest Christian library, and attended dawn service in the Greek Orthodox basilica.
As the first grey light of morning leaked into the arid Sinai Valley, it spread its shimmer of divine glory across gilded mosaics.
It’s far more rewarding to treat a cultural tour like a pilgrimage, to focus on one period, or even one single artwork. If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there, as someone once put it.
Excerpted from an article by
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