“Byzantium”, at the Royal Academy, is a richly compelling exhibition,  devoted to the ancient art and artefacts of the Byzantine era. The show ranges across more than twelve centuries, beginning in 330, with the founding of Constantinople by Emperor Constantine, and ending in 1453, when the city now known as Istanbul fell to the Turks and the once great Byzantine empire was finally brought to its knees. An unprecedented haul of masterpieces has been drawn from museums in the Ukraine, Egypt, Italy, Jerusalem and many other countries besides. They are exhibited in a sequence of nine, low-lit galleries. Each room houses a forest of plinthed glass cases, the design of which – whether deliberately or coincidentally – evokes the form of the Byzantine reliquary.

The most sacred relics of art on display at the Royal Academy include no fewer than nine large icons from the monastery of St Catherine, in Sinai – the collections of which, forgotten and overlooked until the 1960s, must be counted one of the great art historical rediscoveries of the twentieth century. There are glittering, solemn-faced icons from Kiev and Russia, great treasures from France and America, as well as a number of extraordinary works of goldsmithery – looted from Constantinople by Venetian mercenary soldiers – that have been released from the vaults of the treasury of St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice.

The result is an exceptional gathering of more than 300 objects – not so much an exhibition as a temporarily convened museum, devoted not only to the faith but to the broader culture of Constantinople and its empire in the Middle Ages. There is a gallery devoted to court life, housing objects that range from stunningly intricate gold earrings to a jewel-encrusted, filigree-fine gold body chain designed as an acentuating frame for the female form – the ne plus ultra of Byzantine imperial bling. There are humbler domestic objects too, relics of a raucous and comedic imagination – running sharply counter to most stereotypical views about the art of the Christian East – including a revelatory group of painted plates and bowls from places as diverse as Egypt and Eastern Thessaly. A cockatoo struts while a cartoon fish munches away at a field of diagrammatic grubs. A glazed bowl of circa 1220, discovered in the Paphos area of Cyprus, is decorated with the teetering form of a vigorous and boss-eyed Dionysian reveller. This abbreviated diagram of human energies, with staring eyes and tip-tilted body, might have been painted by some ancient, Byzantine Picasso.

It has been more than fifty years since the last major British exhibition of Byzantine art – at the Edinburgh Festival and the Victoria and Albert Museum – but even that was considerably smaller than the Royal Academy show, and it contained far fewer icons. “Byzantium” is such a rare and unusual show, in fact, that its like will probably never be seen again. It is very unlikely that the works from St Catherine’s monastery will be allowed out in future years. The same is true of many of the works from France. The Treasury of St Mark’s in Venice has already made it known, quite explicitly, that it will never lend its Byzantine masterpieces again. They are simply deemed too fragile, too precious to travel. It has become a tiresome cliche to say that such-and-such an exhibition is a once in a lifetime experience, but in the case of this particular exhibition it is true.

 

Gibbon himself was only building on a much older western prejudice against Byzantium, and Byzantine art in particular. Giorgio Vasari, whose mid sixteenth-century Lives of the Artists is the founding text of western art history, made no secret of his own deep hatred for what he called “the old art of the Greeks” (“the Greeks” being his pejorative, catch-all term for the artists of the Byzantine world). Vasari, whose world view was shaped by a profound Tuscan patriotism, should really have known better, especially given that the Baptistry of his own beloved Florence contains one of the very greatest masterpieces of the Italo-Byzantine mosaic tradition, a great ceiling depicting the horrors of hell and the paradise of the blessed. The great traditions of Italian art and Byzantine art were inestricably intertwined. But Vasari was made oblivious to that by his own hobby horse, namely the idea that the golden age of ancient Greece and Rome had been succeeded by a thousand years of darkness – only to be revived by the Italian artists of what he, so influentially, termed “la rinascita”, or Renaissance.

That the Byzantine empire – which stretched across more than a thousand years and reached across continents, from the Balkans to Asia and Africa – might simply have represented one thing or one idea is patently absurd. The Royal Academy’s exhibition attacks this preconception from a number of angles. First and foremost, it demonstrates the huge variety of objects, styles and ideas that were encompassed within Byzantine society. There are illuminated books, richly illustrated with paintings that hark back to the styles of ancient Rome, which serve as a reminder that Byzantine scholars were as determined as any of their counterparts in the West to keep classical learning alive. There are a host of secular court objects – intricately carved ivories depicting scenes from the hunt, or goblets decorated with dancing, writhing mythological figures – which put paid to the myth that the world of Byzantine court culture somehow lacked sophistication and wit.

But above all, there are a number of compelling objects – and juxtapositions of objects – which utterly demolish the notion that Byzantine art marked a fatal step back from the beauty and brilliance of the classical world. The show opens with an extended demonstration, across a number of art forms, of the profound continuities that linked Byzantine art to the art of late antiquity. Early Byzantine images of Christ, whether created from mosaic or beaten from silver or carved from marble, imagine the Son of God in a language directly drawn from the classical past. Beardless, fresh-faced, sharp-eyed, awe-inspiringly calm, he is Apollo reborn in the name of a new faith. Displaced, in time, by the familiar figure of the bearded Christ, this Byzantine Apollonian figure never quite disappeared from the vocabulary of Christian art (indeed, Michelangelo would revive it for the figure of his Christ in the Last Judgement, on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel – although Vasari, naturally, does not mention this Hellenistic-Byzantine borrowing on the part of his hero).

The exhibition also offers compelling evidence that the lifeblood of Byzantine painting, in the form of the icon, was directly transfused from antiquity. A first-century Egyptian tomb portrait from Fayum in Egypt is displayed next to the image of an icon from seventh-century Constantinople. The vivid immediacy of the two faces – one that of an Egyptian middle-class woman who lived not long after the time of Christ, but who is unlikely to have been herself a Christian; the other, that of the Madonna painted six hundred years later – is uncannily similar. Even the technique by which both works were created has a great deal in common. In other words, there was a direct link between the last phase of classical painting – whether carried out in Egypt or Rome or anywhere along the Mediterranean – and the art of Byzantium. What that proves in turn is that, far from abandoning and clouding the achievements of the classical past, it was Byzantine artists who most fruitfully preserved the traditions of classical art, passing them on to the west. This is precisely the opposite of the pattern as Giorgio Vasari perceived it.

Byzantine art was almost always a dynamic and crucial influence on western art, rather than a dead weight holding it back. The point is made in many different ways by this exhibition – not least by the telling juxtaposition of one of the many great early crucifixions held in the collections of the Pinacoteca in Pisa, with the type of Byzantine images of Christ on the Cross that must have inspired it.

The organisers have saved the very best to last, with an entrancing display of icons from the monastery of St Catherine. As if to dispel, for once and for all, the idea that Byzantine art was the static, hieratic, petrified tradition mythologised by its western detractors, the final image is a spectacularly vivid and vigorous work of art, one of the most remarkable of all the many remarkable images in “Byzantium”. The Ikon of the Heavenly Ladder of St John Klimakos seethes with humanity, trembles with a spirit of fearful aspiration. The massed monks of the Byzantine world ascend a ladder towards heaven. As they do so a legion of black devils, each one a silhouette of pure evil, seeks to hoik them down to hell. A host of anxious angels look on, like spectators at a strange and cruel game. The sky, which is not really the sky, but the vault of heaven, is burnished gold. This is the world as it looks to people who truly believe in the promise of paradise, and eternal life.