: "The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity" will be on view
at the Hermitage Rooms, Somerset House, from Thursday, March 30,
to Sunday, September 3.
This major exhibition brings to London for the first time a
collection of classical Greek, Roman and Byzantine luxury
artworks from The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg,
including finely decorated silver and gold, Athenian red-figure
vases and exquisite cameos. These objects, which have seldom been
seen outside Russia before, tell a little-known story of the
development of art and civilization over more than 6,000 years,
from Sixth Century BC Greece to the Middle Ages, and they
overturn familiar assumptions about the period.
The exhibition challenges the conventional idea that the new
Christian art of the Byzantine Empire, usually represented by
icon painting, rejected completely the artistic styles and themes
of classical Greece and Rome. By looking at objects of luxury art
from this period, rather than icons, the exhibition demonstrates
the remarkable continuity of these classical traditions notably
in precious metalwork, jewelry and ivory, at a time when
classical art is usually thought to have died out completely. The
State Hermitage Museum's collections of this material, much of
which was excavated from tombs and burials in the Crimea and its
Russian hinterland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, are
unique and this exhibition will be the first to explore the
implications of these discoveries in detail.
The exhibition begins around 500 BC in ancient Greece when
artists perfected a way of representing the world that combined
extraordinary fidelity to nature with ideals of harmony and
beauty. This breakthrough in naturalistic art has become known as
the "Greek Revolution" and it is epitomized in this exhibition by
the depictions of figures in Athenian vase painting, most
beautifully expressed in the famous "First Swallow of Spring"
vase from the late Sixth Century BC.
Classical artistic values were inherited by the Romans from the
Second Century BC onward. Roman artists continued to draw on
Greek conventions and to develop the classical language of art in
representations of traditional subject matter, as illustrated by
delicately engraved gems and cameos. A cameo included in this
exhibition is decorated with a lively scene of Alexander the
Great hunting wild boar.
The second part of the exhibition explores the continuation of
the classical legacy in the Byzantine world after Constantine the
Great moved the heart of the Roman Empire from Italy to
Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). A rarely exhibited group of
remarkably well preserved textiles, including a portrait of the
goddess Ge, introduce the continuing interest in "pagan"
mythological themes long after the rise of Christianity.
The survival of classicism in the Byzantine world, however,
became most clearly apparent to scholars in the Twentieth Century
from examples of gold and silver and other treasures discovered
through excavations in Russian lands - sometimes far beyond the
edges of the Eastern Roman Empire. These rich collections entered
the Hermitage and have been subject to study by an international
community of scholars in recent decades. A highlight of this part
of the London exhibition will be a group of silver and
silver-gilt dishes that can be dated accurately from control
stamps on their bases to the Sixth and Seventh Centuries AD. This
proves that they are the creation of medieval art despite their
classical style, quality and imagery. One silver dish from the
age of Justinian (527-565 AD) depicts a pastoral scene of a
goatherd with his animals that harks back to the art of
Hellenistic Greece.
The Hermitage rooms are in the South Building, Somerset House,
Strand. For information, 020 7845 4630 or
www.hermitagerooms.org.uk.
