ABSTRACT
Not much late Byzantine art has survived, and of what remains some survives precariously in insecure lands even now, so its keepers tend to be especially protective and averse to lending. Gratitude is therefore owed to the curator Helen Evans and her colleagues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; they toiled for years to gather works scattered in twenty-seven countries and many more institutions. The urge to include was obviously balanced by inspired selection criteria, for the result is an organic corpus of surviving late Byzantine art that is more than the sum of the parts, while also being broadly representative technically, geographically and temporally. For Byzantine religion, art and culture were far more successful conquerors than any emperor, and the visitor to the exhibition soon encounters Bulgarian, Serb, Armenian, Russian, Macedonian and Moldavian or Romanian works that are purely Byzantine in every way.
