ABSTRACT
The theme of the Symposium was an exploration of the British view of Byzantium. Amongst all else it gave the opportunity to provide a historical framework to the British Museum's major exhibition of Byzantine art, 'Byzantium. Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections' .1 This exhibition put on display over two hundred and fifty treasures of Byzantine art from more than thirty collections in the United Kingdom, and it showed a range of media from manuscripts to fragments of monumental mosaics, including icons from the National Collection of Icons held in the British Museum. This exhibition supplied visual materials which were treated in several of the papers and gave an extra, invaluable dimension to the whole symposium. The Director, Dr. R. G. W. Anderson gave the opening address at the symposium, and quoted the anecdote recorded in the exhibition catalogue introduction: that in 1860 Panizzi, the museum's principal librarian in answer to the question whether there were 'Byzantine, Oriental, Mexican and Peruvian antiquities stowed away in the basement?' gave the reply, 'Yes, a few of them; and, I may well add, that I do not think it any great loss they are not better placed than they are'.
