Art: Tale of Two Cities

There can hardly have been two distant cities whose fate was, for good and ill, more intimately linked than Venice and Constantinople. Soon after the Emperor Constantino the Great established his new Christian Rome by the Bosporus in 334 A.D., Constantinople, the fabled golden city of Byzantium, became the matrix of European civilization. During Constantinople's rise, Rome was a tract of ruins and Venice only a cluster of wattle huts on a lagoon mudbank.

In the 6th century, Venice allied itself with the Byzantine Empire, and from the 9th to the 13th centuries the emerging Venetian culture was saturated with Byzantine prototypes. Venice, in fact, was the main valve through which Byzantine influence in art, architecture, literature and scholarship was pumped into Italy. By one of the treacherous ironies of politics, it was a Venetian doge who, in 1204, diverted the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople from end to end, destroying the Byzantine hegemony forever.

The ancient and Oedipal bond between the two cities is the subject of what must be the most beautiful exhibition to be seen anywhere in the world this summer. "Venice and Byzantium," a collection of some 130 works ranging in date from the 4th to the 17th centuries, is on view at the Doges' Palace in Venice until Sept. 30.

Aloof Abstraction. The material is mostly drawn from Italian museums and churches, and it has its gaps, caused by the inimitable pigheadedness of Italian art bureaucracy. Thus Ravenna would not lend the most important single Byzantine object in Italy, the 6th century ivory throne of Maximian. All the same, one could not wish for a better introduction to Byzantine influence in Italy—not only the works made in Constantinople and then imported or looted, but also the ones made by the artists of the Adriatic coast. All the canons of Byzantine style are there: the liturgical stateliness of form, the encyclopedic richness of ornament and material (gold, silver, precious stones, enamel), the sublime monotony of pose and gesture by which the human figure was depicted only as the dwelling place of a thought or a doctrine, the flat mantle of peacock colors, the linear arabesques. An ivory carving like the 10th century Apostles John and Paul—their long-toed feet, under the prismatic ripple of drapery, as articulate as hands—shows the almost neurotic tenderness that the Byzantine style could muster. But the more usual tone of high Byzantine art was an aloof abstraction.

Such figures as the majestic green-feathered angel and the rigid Madonna on the lunette fresco from Sant'Angelo in Formis (see color overleaf) are flesh-made-geometry. Even when a mosaicist tried to be more "naturalistic," as the Venetian artist who executed a Head of an Apostle in Rome around 1218 seems to have done, the medium itself—thousands of glass cubes like colored teeth—automatically formalized the work.