International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Sarah J. Teetor
University of Vienna, Art History Department, Vienna, Austria; 
[e-mail]
The Construction of Byzantium through Objects: 
Challenges and Potential in Exhibitions
The veritable “absence of Byzantium” – to quote Averil Cameron – in the common consciousness 
of many Europeans and North Americans is an issue not only for university departments and 
specialists in Byzantine studies, but also for curators of exhibitions of Byzantine art who are charged 
with the task of bringing a seemingly foreign, even exotic culture to a broad public with little 
prior knowledge of the Byzantine empire. While such exhibitions are inherently educational and 
formative for many visitors, they also provide scholars with an opportunity to reassess the current 
state of knowledge, to explore new connections and to enhance the visibility of Byzantium in a 
larger context. 

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This paper will investigate how the political and cultural entity “Byzantium” has been 
constructed through objects in several large-scale exhibitions of Byzantine art held from 1977 to 
today. In these exhibitions each object serves a double function: on the one hand, as an art object 
removed from its original setting and evaluated according to established art historical criteria; and 
on the other hand, as a piece of material culture that carries with it inherent historical, social and in 
many instances religious meanings.
A case study will trace multiple approaches to a single object in the framework of different 
exhibitions, and explore how ambiguity allows objects to be interpreted in various contexts, some 
of which underscore the few ingrained notions of the Byzantine empire. Aware of the difficulty to 
reconcile the complexity of recent scholarship with the need to form a simplified, coherent narrative 
in an exhibition, this paper asks: (how) is it possible to create an image of Byzantium through 
objects that moves beyond stereotypes of wealth, decadence and spirituality?