Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art

Papers from the 42nd Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, London, 20-22 March 2009

Liz James, Antony Eastmond, Liz James, Antony Eastmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351871099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte medievale

The essays collected in this book were delivered at the XLII Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, held in London in 2009 to accompany the exhibition Byzantium 330-1453, at the Royal Academy. The exhibition was one of the most ambitious and complex exhibitions ever mounted at the Royal Academy, as well as one of the most popular, and the overall aim of the book is to reflect on the exhibition of Byzantine art, both as an academic and popular exercise, and through the choice and discussion of individual objects. Exhibitions present a very different picture of Byzantium and its culture from works of history. The choices of object for display, their arrangement, and the underlying aims of exhibition curators and designers mean that every exhibition presents a different picture of Byzantium. Particular emphases can be placed, whether on everyday life or high court culture; Constantinople or the provinces; or claims of continuity or change over the Byzantine millennium. The essays explore aspects of the image of Byzantium that results from these choices. Given the enormous popularity of exhibitions of Byzantine objects (continued after the completion of this volume by exhibitions in Paris, Bonn and Istanbul), art has become one of the most popular and accessible means of popularizing Byzantium to a wide public audience. Hitherto there has been no general consideration of either the historiography of Byzantine exhibitions or the ways in which they have been set up to present different aspects of Byzantine culture to an academic and general public. The essays are divided into 3 sections: Exhibiting Byzantium sets the 2009 exhibition into the context of other exhibitions of Byzantine art and considers the issues involved in curating and viewing such major collections of medieval art; Object Lessons offers a set of studies of individual objects that were in the exhibition; Byzantium through its Art moves to consider Byzantine art more widely, thinking about the different ways in which objects can be used to study Byzantine culture and society. These are preceded by an introduction by the editors which sets the volume in context.

Part 1
Exhibiting Byzantium

1.
Learning lessons: from the Mother of God to Byzantium 330–1453

Maria Vassilaki

When I was first asked by the Benaki Museum director, Professor Angelos Delivorrias, to organize an exhibition dedicated to the Theotokos, the Mother of God, I was entering terra incognita.¹ At the time, I assumed that organizing an exhibition would be like writing a Ph.D. thesis. It did not take me long to realize that it was far more difficult and complicated than I had anticipated. In a thesis, the struggles are with yourself, the research, the ideas and points you want to make and, above all, with the supervisor. In an exhibition, the struggle is with yourself, the research needed, the points you want to raise, your ideas on how to organize the exhibition and how to display its concept and sections. There are battles with your wish list, which has to contain at least three times more objects than needed, with turning the wish list into a loans list, with the hosting institution, with the lenders, with the contributors to the exhibition catalogue, and with the sponsors.

Furthermore, curators sometimes find themselves dealing with much more complicated issues than these, as diplomacy and politics are part of the exhibitions game. The political situation or political tensions and complications in certain areas, which appear unexpectedly, can definitely make life as an exhibition curator very difficult, affecting, for example, decisions on loans which had supposedly been secured long ago. All these are lessons learnt once you start working on an exhibition.

Other lessons from the very first stages include: never give up; be open to suggestions from lending institutions; above all, be as diplomatic as possible. The curator learns to become flexible to decisions which prevent the presence of objects initially thought to be absolutely crucial for the points you want to raise. You must be prepared to find alternative objects and create alternative sections. Until the very last moment, you keep on making changes and you are not allowed to think for a moment that this is the end of the world. It is not.

When the Mother of God exhibition was coming to an end, because it was a success, many people were asking me the same question: what exhibition are you planning to curate after this one? My typical reaction (at least to those that I knew very well) was to ask them straight out, are you crazy? To others, I was more diplomatic, saying ‘I’m afraid I cannot curate another exhibition at this moment as I have to go back to my academic duties.’ To those who would insist that it is not possible to give up once you have made a successful exhibition, I would to say ‘As the Mother of God is the first exhibition I have ever organized, I feel that I am following the pattern of the well-known story: once you are taught how to play cards, you always win the first time, but if you take it for granted that you will always win, then you bring yourself into trouble.’ ‘Better not’, I used to conclude. I did not think for a moment at that time that I would curate another exhibition in the years to follow, one which was going to be much bigger than the Mother of God, and much more complicated in every aspect of it, in the form of Byzantium 330–1453 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. And so, in this paper I will compare the experiences of curating an exhibition organized in Greece for a Greek Cultural Institution, the Benaki Museum, with an exhibition organized in Britain for the Royal Academy of Arts.

The Benaki exhibition on the Mother of God was the Museum’s contribution to the worldwide celebrations of the 2000th anniversary of the Nativity of Christ. I very much liked the idea that when everybody worldwide was celebrating Christ, our exhibition was going to celebrate his Mother. My foreword to the exhibition catalogue clearly describes my aims in organizing such an exhibition: ‘its central theme should be the veneration of the Virgin in Byzantium, that is between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries, and the visual material upon which this rested’.² In addition, the exhibition aimed to illuminate the very special relation that the Virgin had with Constantinople. Mother of God was divided into six sections, each of which was designed to throw light on a different aspect of the veneration of the Theotokos, ranging from early representations of the Virgin, through her public and private cults to her position between east and west and her representation with her son. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition had a definite aim, inasmuch as it looked to fill a lacuna, the absence of a comprehensive study on the Theotokos in which issues of cult, history, literature, theology and art were considered. As a result, the catalogue entries were designed to be minor studies of the pieces, rather than summary entries.

For the Mother of God exhibition, I had to work on everything: the layout and sections of the exhibition and its catalogue; travel to wherever was needed to secure loans; the administration; and to write every single letter addressed to every single institution all over the world from whom loans were sought, whether the letter was in Greek, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish or Russian. Each time I had to locate the right person to translate my letters so that a letter in Russian would reach the City Museum of Western and Oriental Arts in Kiev, which is now the Bohdan and Barbara Khanenko Museum of Arts, and would ask for the encaustic icon of the Virgin and Child originally at Sinai or so that a letter in Spanish would arrive for the Cardinal of the Santa Iglesia Catedral Basilica de Cuenca, Anastasio Martínez Sáez.

Fig. 1.1 Santa Iglesia Catedral Basilica de Cuenca, reliquary diptych. 1367–84

The cardinal himself brought the Cuenca diptych (Fig. 1.1) to Athens to be displayed in the exhibition. I remember him arriving at the Benaki very late, after midnight, on a weekday in October 2000, as the flight from Madrid was terribly delayed. We had to wait for him, no matter when he arrived, so that we could put the diptych into the Benaki’s safety box. In the late and long hours of that night of October 2000, I began to feel as though I was inside a Luis Buñuel film as the cardinal arrived at the Benaki carrying the diptych in a small wooden crate, which looked like a wooden suitcase. When he returned to the Benaki the next morning to take the diptych out of the safety box and supervise its installation, I asked him if he would pose with me. The Benaki photographer, the late Kostas Manolis, was there to commemorate the event (Fig. 1.2). It was taken at the entrance hall of the exhibition. We are standing in front of the wall decorated by a well-known Greek painter, Alekos Levidis. As Levidis knows the technique of icon-painting extremely well, he imitated it for this image. He applied dark red on the wall, echoing the red bole used by icon-painters for the preparation of the wooden surface of an icon, the last layer of the icon’s preparation before the gold leaf is applied. Then, as if he were painting an icon, he placed above the bole the wooden letters MΗΤΗΡ ΘΕΟΥ (Mother of God), gilded in exactly the way that icon-painters used to gild the background of an icon. He then used half of the Virgin’s face from the famous two-sided icon from Kastoria with the Virgin Hodegetria on one side and the Man of Sorrows on the other.

Fig. 1.2 Benaki Museum, Athens. Maria Vassilaki and the Cardinal Anastasio Martínez Sáez at the entrance hall of the Mother of God exhibition, October 2000

Source: K. Manolis

Though I was an amateur curator, I decided to organise an international conference at the closing of the exhibition in mid January 2001, and Nikos Oikonomides, who was then the Director of the Centre for Byzantine Research, generously agreed to host the conference at the National Research Foundation. Oikonomides’s sad death meant that our joint conference did not take place; however, his successor at the Centre, Professor Evangelos Chryssos, was eager to help me to organize it and it was dedicated it to Nikos Oikonomides’s memory.³ No visual documentation has survived from that conference. The only pictures come from my closing remarks which I illustrated with an unexpected find: a contemporary football club in Greece called, appropriately enough for the Mother of God, ‘Hodegetria’ (Fig. 1.3).⁴ I discovered the Hodegetria club by chance, through an exhibition of a contemporary Greek photographer, Thanassis Stavrakis. The Hodegetria team is based at Tabouria in Piraeus, an area with a strong left-wing tradition. They adopted the name ‘Hodegetria’ in the troubled years of the junta (1967–1974), when they addressed the Virgin and sought her aid in facing the political problem of the club’s survival in difficult times. As I noted then, the role of the Theotokos in the political life of Byzantium is well known and has been widely interpreted, but her role in contemporary Greek political life may offer an equally interesting dimension of the phenomenon, and is a subject that could well reward further study.⁵

Fig. 1.3 The ‘Hodegetria’ football team at their training ground Source: Th. Stavrakis

The Mother of God exhibition was opened by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomaios, who also wrote a two-page blessing for the catalogue. A picture taken on the occasion (Fig. 1.4) shows those who were present at the opening: the President of the Hellenic Republic, Mr. Stephanopoulos; the Minister of Education, Mr. Efthymiou. The Honorary Committee of the exhibition explains something of the politics behind the exhibition.⁶ The Scientific Committee on the same page of the catalogue shows museum directors and curators who helped with the loans as well as Byzantinists, who also helped to sort out difficult loans or who contributed with their work to a better understanding of the role of the Theotokos in Byzantium.

Fig. 1.4 Benaki Museum, Athens. Taken at the opening of the Mother of God exhibition

Source: K. Manolis

The Mother of God exhibition (Fig. 1.5) is to this day the most successful exhibition ever organized by the Benaki. Skira, who undertook the publication of the catalogue, has sold out of all of the copies of the English edition, which they reprinted three times. The success of the exhibition, the sales of its catalogue and other merchandise produced for the occasion (a video both in English and Greek, a booklet with a summary of the exhibition’s sections and objects) contrasted, however, with the poor coverage the exhibition had in the international press and the media. It received no reviews in periodicals such as the Burlington Magazine, Apollo or the Art Bulletin. Only The Art Newspaper published a review, and the only review of the catalogue came from CAA Reviews online.⁷ On the other hand, the Greek Press covered it very generously.

Mother of God was, for me, a lesson for beginners on how to curate an exhibition. And though I had made myself absolutely clear to everybody who was asking about the next one, it did not take long before Robin Cormack and I were approached by Norman Rosenthal, the Royal Academy’s Secretary of Exhibitions, and asked to organize an exhibition on the full range of Byzantine art from 330 to 1453. It was not easy to turn such an offer down. That is how we started in 2003. The exhibition was originally planned for October 2009, but in 2006 the Royal Academy decided to open it a year earlier in October 2008. It ran at the Royal Academy of Arts in Burlington House from 25 October 2008 to 22 March 2009. Figures in The Art Newspaper show that it was one of the most successful exhibitions of 2008–09, attracting average daily visitor numbers of 2,300 and overall visitor numbers of some 342,726.⁸

Fig. 1.5 Benaki, Museum, Athens. General view of the Mother of God exhibition

Source: Sp. Panayotopoulos

From the very beginning, certain things were completely different in this exhibition. I was not its sole curator. In fact, there were three curators, the other two being Robin Cormack, my long-ago supervisor and now dear friend and colleague, and Adrian Locke, the internal curator based at the Royal Academy. Dr Locke is a specialist in contemporary South American art and had previously curated the Aztecs exhibition. Further, the exhibition would tak...