Volume 44, Number 9 · May 29, 1997
'A More Glorious House'
By Peter Brown
The Glory of Byzantium
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 11-July 6, 1997
The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, AD 843-1261
catalog of the exhibition edited by Helen C. Evans, by William D. Wixom
Abrams/Metropolitan Museum of Art, 574 pp., $50.00 (paper)
In around 1140, the Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, rummaging among the ancient treasures of his monastery, came upon a 'precious chalice out of one solid sardonyx.' Produced over a thousand years before, in the Alexandria of Queen Cleopatra, it had been stored in the Imperial Palace of Constantinople until sent, some centuries earlier, as a diplomatic handout to impress the distant Franks. We can now see it in The Glory of Byzantium exhibition currently in New York. The good abbot wanted to be reassured that his abbey had got the best:
Review, 6147 words
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