ABSTRACT
After the five months of exhibition, reviews and events, I was invited to reflect on how we look at Byzantium, and also how we have looked at it in the past. It depends of course on who ‘we’ are. Are ‘we’ art historians, or the general public, or historians of Byzantium, or Greeks? I went round the Royal Academy exhibition several times. Among the visitors there were usually groups of Greek-speakers, often ladies; when I went round it with a group from my college, Keble, one of the younger members (an academic, not a student), who happens to be Greek herself, said she was amazed to see the ‘Byzantine’ objects from Western collections, and asked if it was really true that Catholics had done the adaptation and remodelling. Many of the other non-specialist but very interested persons I know who went to the exhibition were admiring but puzzled, not really knowing what to make of it. When I wrote a paper called ‘The absence of Byzantium’ and published it in a Greek journal, Nea Hestia, in January, 2008, almost every subsequent monthly issue until April 2009 carried a response, many of them from Greek academics. Whether Byzantium is present or absent, how it relates to modern Greece and whether it is or is not part of the history of Europe were all among the issues raised, intentionally or not, by Byzantium 330-1453 at the Royal Academy.
