Treasures for a Drowsy Emperor

William Butler Yeats once dreamed of becoming, when he died,

. . . such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Visitors to the darkened halls of the Baltimore Museum of Art last week found them aglimmer with the forms that Grecian goldsmiths once made. Assembled by Baltimore's Walters Art Gallery, the museum show was the biggest and best exhibition of Early Christian and Byzantine art ever seen in the U.S. A fair share of all the Byzantine art left in the world was on display.

Great Playthings. Little gold ducks waddled after pearls in unending alternation, to make a necklace handsome enough for a 5th Century princess. Ivory saints beckoned from panels small enough to put in a wallet. Rams and lions from ancient Antioch displayed their gold and silver manes in 5th Century mosaics. There was a polished statuette of Astarte, the pagan goddess of fertility, whose memory died hard among the Christian farmers of Northern Syria. Bronze oil lamps, surmounted by leaping lions and the hooked beaks of griffins, stood dry and wickless under glass. Once the lamps had flickered, fiercely golden, on the night-tables of dying bishops and children afraid of the dark.

The show spanned eleven centuries, from the reign of Constantine I to the killing of the last Constantine by his Moslem conquerors in 1453. Throughout those dark ages Byzantium had blazed, fitfully bright, as the half-classical, half-oriental capital of pagan and Christian art alike. Baltimore's entire exhibition would have been barely enough to ornament a single villa for a favorite courtesan of the 9th Century Emperor Theophilus. In a day when Rome was a vast ruin, and Paris and London mud-walled towns, Theophilus was tearing down palaces in Byzantium (which Constantine I had renamed Constantinople) simply for the fun of planning new and better ones'. Theophilus liked such playthings as a pair of life-size golden lions, which crouched before his throne and roared, lashing their tails, on state occasions. He also had a golden tree, sheltering a host of gold birds which warbled and flapped their wings.

Great Expectations. Most envious among the visitors to Constantinople were the Moslems, who for eight centuries drew a net of conquest closer & closer about the capital. When Mohamed II finally succeeded in crashing Constantinople's triple walls (in 1453), the townspeople hopefully streamed for their proudest monument, the Church of Saint Sophia, assured by a prophet that the Moslems would never conquer it. "In the space of an hour," wrote Historian Edward Gibbon, "the sanctuary, the choir, the nave, the upper and lower galleries, were filled with the multitudes of fathers and husbands, of women and children, of priests, monks, and religious virgins. . . . Their confidence was founded on the prophecy of an enthusiast or an impostor . . . that an angel would descend from heaven with a sword in his hand, and would deliver the empire. . . .'

The angel did not appear. Moslems swept the church of its worshippers and stripped it of its movable riches; it was gutted of its Christian treasures and converted into a mosque. Byzantium crumbled to a few fragments like those at Baltimore and became a place for poets to dream about.

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