Africa and Byzantium an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, November 19, 2023–March 3, 2024; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, April 14–July 21, 2024.
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Andrea Myers Achi.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 351 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press)
In 496 CE a giraffe arrived at Constantinople. It was a rare event. The exotic animal was brought by ambassadors from the distant south, possibly from Nubia (a kingdom on the Nile roughly coextensive with modern Sudan). It had lingered on its way at Gaza (then, in more fortunate times, a rich entrepôt between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean), where it impressed a professor of Greek literature. It may also have left its mark on local craftsmen. Mosaics laid down at this time in a synagogue and a church not far from Gaza show realistic giraffes with small horns, steeply sloping backs, majestic necks, and spotted hides, when most other mosaics of giraffes showed them looking like camels with measles.1
In Constantinople, the giraffe would have been placed in the menagerie attached to the imperial palace. On ceremonial occasions—the Byzantine equivalent of photo ops—the emperor would descend from the palace to feed the giraffe with his own hands. By doing this, he showed that the strange animal had been tamed by his presence. The nations that ringed Byzantium along the edges of the known world were supposed to behave like that biddable beast and succumb to the charms of the empire.
It was a very “Byzantine” view of the world. All roads were thought to lead to Constantinople. All good things—high thought, high art, stable rule, and the comforts of civilized living—if found elsewhere were assumed to have come from that single creative center, as if fed from the hands of the emperor.
“Africa and Byzantium” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been put together, and its objects commented upon at length, largely in order to rebut that narrow, view of the relationship between Byzantium and the wider world. This splendid exhibition was gotten underway by Helen C. Evans, who for many decades has stunned the public with exhibitions of the art of Byzantium and its relations with its immediate neighbors in the Islamic and the Slavonic worlds. The catalog, skillfully edited by Andrea Myers Achi, reaches even farther: across the Mediterranean shore of Africa, from the
