Faith and power: the Metropolitan Museum's triptych of Byzantine exhibitions reaches its conclusion with an unparalleled overview of the art of the Palaiologan era. Angeliki Lymberopoulou celebrates a remarkable achievement

Twenty seven years ago, the Metropolitan Museum entertainered an exhibition 'Age of Spirituality', dedicated to the early Byzantine period (324-843) This was followed in 1997 through the very popular 'Glory of Byzantium', which focused upon the middle Byzantine period (843-1261) 'Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)' is the third in this landmark series, and the first major display ever to celebrate the last phase of Byzantine culture

sum of two units significant dates provide its time frame: 1261 marks the extreme point of the Latin rule in Constantinople following the fall of the city to western crowds during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 The Palaiologans, the last indigenous dynasty, claimed the imperial chair of state lending their name to an era of cultural flourishing with intense intellectual, scholarly and artistic activity. Artists make knowned a distinctive style that favoured tall, robust figures, with the articulation of their bodies revealed end their garments, as seen it] the archangel Gabriel in the noble two-sided icon of the Annunciation originally from the temple of the Virgin Peribletos, Ohrid.

Although this era came to a dramatic extremity with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman ottomans in 1453, the exhibition carries upon until 1557, when, for the first time at any time the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf applied the bourn 'Byzantine' to the long-lasting empire. Its inhabitants would not have rejoined to this designation, since they considered themselves the heirs to the eastern Roman Empire and called themselves Romans. Wolf however, through using a variant of Byzantion, the name of the of greece city subsumed by Constantinople, acknowledged and paid tribute to the hellenic heritage of the empire. As Helen Evans, the Museum's Curator of Early Christian and Byzantine Art, places it 1557 is an appropriate extremity date for this show if 'we want to diocese it from the point of Constantinople in the years after the fall when the memory of the empire as a real state is still "alive" and has not at the same time entered the sphere of the myth'.

The exhibition brings together an ambitious number of objects--more than 350 upon loan from twenty-five countries, a gigantic achievement given that more than eighty by means of cent of these masterpieces have not ever before been exhibited outside the museums or monasteries in which they are housed. Displayed above twelve rooms in an artificially lit, ample space, in a non suffocating manner, they present the public not only a real feast for the eyes on the other hand also a unique opportunity to familiarize itself with the last phase of Byzantium. This is the greatest advertisement that late and post-Byzantine art has at any time enjoyed and it will remain unsurpassed for many decades to come

Liturgical existences manuscripts, frescoes and icons grasp centre stage--with the last predominant. They are all integral parts of house of god interiors and of the Orthodox liturgy and private devotion. The Triumph of Orthodoxy, from the British Museum, mirrors the importance that the icon of all icons, the Virgin Hodegetria, had acquired in the late Byzantine period. The Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia, a miniature mosaic icon from Dumbarton Oaks, is a stunning example of Palaiologan art and mode of speech (and one of my personal favourites). The realistic anatomical depiction of the men is unusual for Byzantine art, on the other hand the crowded scene, with the varied artificial positions of the martyrs that bring their emotions and their suffering, is typical of the period. The use of icons for private devotion similar as The Man of Sorrows, from s Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome, is explicitly demonstrated in The Dormition of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (Byzantine Museum, Athens), where an icon of the mark is placed on the material part of the dead saint, seen lying in the foreground.

A number of the examples upon display reflect the interaction and mutual influence between late Byzantium and the world around it--Italy, Northern Europe and the Islamic kingdoms. The triptych with the Virgin and Child and Saints (private collection, London) is representative of the hybrid mode of expression developed on Crete, which was beneath Venetian domination from 1211 onwards and not ever returned to the Byzantine Empire. Its central panel depicts the Madre della Consolazione, a mark of the Virgin and Child discloseed by Cretan painters, the left wing the embracing of Peter and Paul, a favoured Byzantine subdue and the right wing sum of two units western deacons. It perfectly throw backs therefore, the cross-cultural demands that the mixed Cretan clientele placed on its painters. Equally exquisite examples of cultural interaction can be seen in the icons from the consecrated Monastery of St Catherine at Sinai, displayed in a extent designed to evoke the nave of its meeting-house A number of the exhibits are referr to as 'Crusader' icons in the literature, because their production involved the two Byzantine and western artists who created a diction with an individual character during the period in which the crusaders rul the Middle East. (1) The influence that the Byzantine icons of the Virgin exercised upon Flemish artists is also demonstrated with more [i]or[/i] less fine examples of their adaptation of the control such as Hayne of Brussels's Virgin and Child from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.