Reviews of the Royal Academy’s exhibition Byzantium have invariably stressed the splendour and quality of the objects displayed while complaining about the relative lack of contextual material explaining the history of Byzantium. In this symposium, we want to take the issue of defining Byzantium through its art as a starting point and to explore some of the ways in which this has raised, and still raises, issues and conflicts.

We are interested both in how the post-Byzantine world has seen Byzantium through its art, the RA exhibition being the most recent demonstration of this. We are also concerned with how the Byzantines themselves used art for self-definition and how the medieval world more widely characterised the empire through its objects.

Areas for discussion include:
• how historians of Byzantium have treated art and empire; how they have reacted to Byzantine art in the context of their general views of Byzantium
• the art of Late Antiquity as a bridge between ‘classical’ and ‘Byzantine’ art
• how the world of the Middle Ages was affected by Byzantine art (Italy, Georgia, the Crusader states)
• the problems in exhibiting Byzantium to a twenty-first century world with little sense of the culture
• how text and image (both ours and theirs) engage with Byzantine art and ideas about Byzantine identity
• how themes beyond material culture have been presented at exhibitions (eg ‘national’ identity, Orthodoxy)
• how exhibitions have influenced perceptions of Byzantium and agendas for studying Byzantium

By popular request, you can now download our guide to running the Byzantine symposium.

Read the Abstracts of Communications from the 41st SPRING SYMPOSIUM OF BYZANTINE STUDIES