Byzantium

[ewx]

Do go and see the Royal Academy's Byzantium Exhibition if you have any interest in that sort of thing. A few comments:

• Many of the pieces of course are Christian artwork; strikingly some of these predate Constantine.
• The most amusing piece was a simple bowl with what I can only describe as a happy fish painted on the inside. It wouldn't look even slightly out of place in the modern world.
• Byzantine religious artists liked writing (or carving) identifications of the figures they depicted, even the ones their audience really ought to be able to get easily like Mary and Jesus. Dead handy for a modern audience though.
• St Paul is pretty reliably depicted with a longer beard than any of his human peers. Makes him pretty easy to pick out.

Comments

[ceb.livejournal.com]

My favourite job perk is free RA trips :-)

[3c66b.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the identifying everyone thing has continuity with Classical art where the same thing often happens -- see Athenian pottery for numerous examples. (Also very handy for a modern audience who may be slightly more at sea with obscure gods, nymphs and so on.)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The (expensive but beautiful) coffee-table book of the exhibition gives a bit more detail about the continuity between the pagan and Christian artwork and indeed, the one turns straight into the other, with substitutions like the good shepherd for Hercules. I guess this kind of thing is exactly why there's a notion of “late antiquity” rather than seeing a sharper shift from the classical to the medieval.