LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Byzantine Art: Centuries
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CAMBRIDGE, MA (September 18, 2002)-This fall Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum will be the first U.S. museum to present an exhibition exploring the life of Byzantine women through art of the era. The display will feature almost 200 objects, including jewelry, icons, religious amulets, textiles, coins, and household items, that date from the 4th through 15th centuries. Byzantine Women and Their World opens October 25, 2002 and will remain on view through April 27, 2003.
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A multifaceted exploration of Byzantine art reveals the didactic element closely linked with the contemplative: The idea that the imagery viewed should elevate and reveal the truth. The dazzling display of gold and strong colors provide the viewer with an elevation of the spirit, the ecstatic experience of a spiritual and intuitive understanding of divinity. Though the images are material, made from mosaic or paint on panels, they bespeak of a transcendent world, the world of the spirit, to be understood through the workings of the spirit which is separate from the physical reality of life. The pious and calm images of saints, Mary or Christ descend their compassionate gaze onto the viewer with an air of reassurance of the mysterious knowledge they have of God. The glittering colors shimmering with the unreal gold of heaven envelop the viewer in such eternal churches as those in Ravenna, and silently provide witness to the strength of faith that created them centuries ago. The icons and mosaics point to the other world in almost surreal quietude.
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The second major phase of the mid-Byzantine period coincided with the rule of the Comneni dynasty (1081–1185) of emperors. Comnenian art inaugurated new artistic trends that continued into the succeeding centuries. A humanistic approach alien to earlier Byzantine art informs the icon Virgin of Vladimir (c. 1125, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). Instead of showing her customary aloofness, the Virgin Mary here presses her cheek against that of her child in an embrace. Comnenian humanism is again encountered in the new theme of the Threnos, the lamentation over the dead body of Christ, rendered with intense pathos in a fresco of 1164 in the church of Nerezi in Croatia.
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Ivory-working was another characteristic Byzantine art, although, like so many others it had its origin in antiquity. One of the earliest ivories of the Byzantine type is the diptych at Monza, showing a princess and a boy, supposed to be Galla Placidia and Valentinian III. This already shows the broad, flattened treatment which seems to mark the ivory work of the East. The majestic archangel of the British Museum, one of the largest panels known, is probably of the 5th century, and almost certainly, as Strzygowski has shown, of Syrian origin. Design and execution are equally fine. The drawing of the body, and the modelling of the drapery, are accomplished and classical.
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After the fall of Byzantium in 1457 Byzantine iconography continued to flourish. This can be seen in Galicia, where from the 14th to the end of the 16th century high-quality Ukrainian examples of icons in the Byzantine style were painted. Over the centuries this style was transformed and became organically Ukrainian. In the 17th and 18th century some of the finest examples of architecture in Ukraine appeared. They were a synthesis of Ukrainian folk architecture with the Byzantine and the baroque styles. Ukrainian wooden churches of that time are unparalleled masterpieces of world renown.
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In studying their prototypes the Byzantine artists learned anew the classical conventions for depicting the clothed figure, in which the drapery clings to the body... revealing the forms beneath—the so-called damp-fold style. They also wanted to include modeling in light and shade, which not only produces the illusion of three-dimensionality but also lends animation to the painted surfaces. Religious images, however, were only acceptable as long as the human figure was not represented as an actual bodily presence. The artists solved the problem by abstraction, that is, by rendering the darks, halftones, and lights as clearly differentiated patterns or as a network of lines on a flat surface, thus preserving the visual interest of the figure while avoiding any actual modeling and with it the semblance of corporeality. Thus were established those conventions for representing the human figure that endured for the remaining centuries of Byzantine art.
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