Art Review: Metropolitan Museum of Arts new Byzantine art blockbuster is Islamic

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Karen Rosenberg

An eighth-century limestone female torso, foreground, from what is now Jordan.

NEW YORK - The Met’s show concludes a series of Byzantine art blockbusters that includes “The Glory of Byzantium” in 1997 and “Byzantium: Faith and Power” in 2004, both also organized by the museum’s curator of Byzantine art, Helen C. Evans. (The Met’s first major exhibition on Byzantium was “The Age of Spirituality” in 1977.) But “Byzantium and Islam” differs substantially from its dazzling and opulent predecessors.  The religious art includes sumptuous ivories, mosaics, manuscripts and metalwork, don’t come looking for gilded icons; they are scarce, owing to religious debates about the use of representational imagery that continued until the mid-ninth century. “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” continues through July 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org [link]