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Byzantium Regained
The Met’s exhibition of art from the African territories of the Byzantine Empire was a triumph.
The show included a staggering 180 objects, among them beautiful Christian ivory reliefs, bronzes of Black figures, crystal animal sculptures, frescos from a Sudanese church, mosaics that left us randy, and some of the most ravishing illuminated manuscripts ever made. A showstopper at the entrance to the show told us that, as curator Andrea Achi noted of the period, different people came into contact, but their skin color was not viewed as a marker of class or rank. Each figure is hunky and dressed in a different style of clothing: a toga, a one-shouldered frock, and a kind of cape whose fabric is tossed over the arm.
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