Byzantium 330 - 1453
25 October 2008 - 22 March 2009
Main Galleries, Burlington House
Saturday – Thursday 10am – 6pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
This exhibition has closed.
Friends of the RA go free
An ambitious grand-scale survey of 1,000 years of history, highlighting the splendours of the Byzantine Empire.
Byzantium 330–1453 comprises around 300 objects including icons, detached wall paintings, micro-mosaics, ivories, enamels and gold and silver metalwork.
The exhibition includes great works from the San Marco Treasury in Venice and rare items from collections across Europe, the USA, Russia, Ukraine and Egypt. The exhibition begins with the foundation of Constantinople in 330 AD by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great and concludes with the capture of the city by the Ottoman forces of Mehmed II in 1453. This is the first major exhibition on Byzantine Art in the United Kingdom for 50 years.
This epic exhibition has been made possible through a collaboration between the Royal Academy of Arts and the Benaki Museum, Athens.
Byzantium 330–1453 follows a chronological progression covering the range, power and longevity of the artistic production of the Byzantine Empire through a number of themed sections. In this way the exhibition explores the origins of Byzantium; the rise of Constantinople; the threat of iconoclasm when emperors banned Christian figurative art; the post-iconoclast revival; the remarkable crescendo in the Middle Ages and the close connections between Byzantine and early Renaissance art in Italy in the 13th and early 14th centuries.
Saturday – Thursday 10am – 6pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
This exhibition has closed.
Friends of the RA go free
Gallery
Mosaic icon of Saint Stephen, c. 1108 - 1113
The Homilies of Monk James Kokkinobaphos, 1100-1150
The Riha paten (Paten with the Communion of the Apostles), 565 - 578
Incense burner in the shape of a church, 10th - 11th century
