Byzantium: Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections (review)

Reviews 151 Buckton, David, ed., Byzantium: Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections, London, British Museum Press, 1995; cloth; pp. 240; 237 plates, 2 maps; R.R.P. AUS$79.95. This catalogue from the British Museum describes over 250 treasures of Byzantine craftsmanship from more than thirty collections in Britain. These objects date from the fourth century to the sixteenth and include silverware, glass, weights, sculpture, jewellery, bronze, lamps, enamel, manuscript illustrations, icons and textiles. Each is illustrated, many in colour, with a brief description and bibliography. Contributors include Robin Cormack, Christopher Entwistle, Rowena Loverance, John Lowden, Marlia Mundell Mango, Maria Vassilaki and Hero Granger-Taylor. A number of the items demonstrate the pervading influence of Byzantine art on western culture and the high respect with which it was viewed. The Psalter of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem (no. 180), made between 1131 and 1143, was written entirely in Latin, but the principal images are all in the Byzantine tradition, possibly by an artist required to produce a careful imitation of Byzantine painting, rather than by a Byzantine-trained expert. The back of the ivory covers (no. 181) shows six works of charity (Matt. 25.35-36), featuring a ruler or rulers, each wearing a different type of Byzantine imperial costume. Lowden suggests that w e can perhaps see in these images the ideal of Melisende's husband King Fulk, as the Christian mler. The royal mitre from the tomb of Emperor Henry VI (d. 1197) in Palermo cathedral was clearly also greatly inspired by the decoration and textile-work of Byzantine vestments. There is valuable discussion of unusual items, such as a portable sundial and calendar (no. 53), probably from Constantinople ca. 500, which showed the day of the week, current phase of the moon and positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac. The descriptions of the objects exhibited can throw useful light on problems of current scholarship: Cormack accepts conclusively an early fourteenth-century dating for the Constantinopolitan rniniature mosaic of the Annunciation, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, while, with Vassilaki, he throws additional light on the provenance and place of training of the artist of an early fourteenth-century triptych with the Mother of God and saints belonging to the National Trust, Polesden Lacey (nos. 220, 223). Mundell Mango in a discussion of the Corbridge lanx (no. 15) throws doubt on the generally accepted view that the scene depicted commemorates a visit to Delos by Julian the Apostate in 363 and that the 152 Reviews object is necessarily fourth-century. No. 164, a silver-gilt weight from the reign of Theodora (1055-56), depicting the Mother of God Blachernitissa and a bust of Theodora, which weighs 32.96g, causes problems for Byzantine metrology: Entwistle's parenthetical suggestion that this object is not a weight but some form of imperial donative is an attractive one. Of especial interest are the items actually found in Britain. One of the earliest of these is a votive plague with the chi-rho symbol, from fourthcentury Roman Britain (part of the Water Newton hoard), locally made and doubtless a votive offering at a Christian shrine (no. 4). Other items have been imported from Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean: these include a silver-gilt ewer with scriptural decoration, (no. 35), probably part of a late fourth-century pirate hoard, which was excavated at Traprain L a w east of Edinburgh in 1919. A large silver plate from the seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship burial (no. 52) had been made and stamped at Constantinople between 491 and 518, and was acquired perhaps by diplomatic gift or by trade. A hemispherical leaded brass censer, perhaps of the early seventh century and now in the British Museum, was said to have been found in the early 1980s outside Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset and seems to have been a unique import (nos. 79, 113b). Apart from the Clephane horn (no. 158) from southern Italy, said by Sir Walter Scott to have been used for centuries in sounding the alarm from the battlements of Carslogie Castle in Fife, the most striking finds in Britain are the silks from the tombs of St...