Byzantine women and their world

This fall Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum will be the first U.S. museum to present an exhibition exploring the life of Byzantine women through art of the era. The display will feature almost 200 objects, including jewelry, icons, religious amulets, textiles, coins, and household items, that date from the 4th through 15th centuries. Byzantine Women and Their World opens October 25, 2002 and will remain on view through April 27, 2003.

The exhibition and an accompanying catalogue grew out of a graduate seminar taught at Harvard University by Ioli Kalavrezou, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Art. To develop the project, Kalavrezou and three of her graduate students, Alicia Walker, Elizabeth Gittings, and Molly Fulghum Heintz, worked for more than two years researching the Byzantine collections at Harvard and at other North American museums. Each of the students served as Andrew W. Mellon interns, a position awarded by the Harvard University Art Museums and funded by the Mellon Foundation for the express purpose of fostering research and teaching between the Art Museums and university departments. The internship program provides new opportunities for students to collaborate with conservators, curators, and faculty from the Art Museums and greater Harvard community, and illustrates the Art Museums' role as a catalyst for creating opportunities for inter-departmental collaboration and study.

The Harvard University Art Museums are remarkable for their value as a teaching resource and provide a forum for academic exchange within the campus community, said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Collaborations such as Byzantine Women and Their World, testify to the Art Museums' commitment to the advance of art historical training by providing exceptional opportunities for students and faculty to work together through the development of scholarly exhibitions.

Traditionally, exhibitions of Byzantine art focused on the spirituality and splendor of the Empire. This will be the first exhibition in this country to consider the everyday life of the Byzantine woman and to present all facets of the female experience - religious and secular, public and private, noblewoman and commoner.

The exhibition will be divided into the general categories of public and private life, with the theme of Women at Work linking the two. The public sphere, which includes sections on Civic Life, Elite Women, and Public Devotion, focuses on female images of authority, such as empresses, the Virgin Mary, female saints, and personifications of cities. The portraits of imperial women on official statuary, weights, coins, and seals promoted women as public icons.

Civic Life includes emblems of communal identity, such as a bronze figure of Tyche, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tyche is a personification of the city's fortune and represents a female figure as a symbol of prosperity. The portraits of empresses on the coins and weights in this section emphasize the importance of women as symbols of the economy and wealth of the empire.

The objects in the Elite Women section emphasize the role of women as patrons of the church, city, and state and as models for accepted notions of female piety and public behavior. Public Devotion explores the ways in which public icons, especially those of the Virgin Mary, represented the authority, security, and morality of the state, as well as that of public officials, aristocrats, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The section devoted to "Women at Work" represents the space between public and private that varied with vocation and lifestyle. While some women's professions were highly visible, as represented by the silver statuette of a dancer on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, most worked at home at spinning and weaving, occupations Byzantines generally regarded as most appropriate for women. Women at Work includes icons, ivory plaques, sculptures, manuscripts, and weaving implements. Midwifery is among the professions represented, and there is a striking image of Eve working at a forge.

The private life of most Byzantine women centered on marriage and family, themes explored in sections titled Marriage, Home, Adornment, and Health and Well-Being.

A model Byzantine marriage was one in which husband and wife formed an equal partnership, a relationship celebrated through jewelry such as the exquisite gold medallions adorning a marriage belt, possibly given to a bride by her husband, on loan from Harvard's Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C.

The jewelry and toiletries featured in the section on Adornment offer insight into the status of the female body in Byzantium and accepted notions of idealized feminine beauty. The bracelets, earrings, and necklaces in this section, as well as ivory boxes with reliefs of mythological scenes or vignettes from the story of Adam and Eve, might have served as wedding gifts.

Home explores the private life of the Byzantine woman through utensils, tapestries, lamps, metal vessels, ceramic ware, and other household items reflecting the domestic spaces in which women spent the majority of their time. In Health and Well-Being, the physical and emotional challenges that women faced and women's responses to them are illuminated through protective amulets and other devices intended to secure health, fertility, and good fortune. Religious icons featuring the Virgin Mary and female saints illustrate how objects of personal devotion made these holy figures accessible as intercessors with Christ.

A fully illustrated catalogue organized according to the exhibition themes will accompany Byzantine Women and Their World. The catalogue will feature introductory essays written by Kalavrezou and noted Byzantine historian Angeliki Laiou, as well as section essays by Walker, Gittings, Heintz, and Bissera Pentcheva (Harvard PhD '01). Harvard students and other scholars in the field have contributed catalogue entries. A conference sponsored by the Art Museums' M. Victor Leventritt fund is scheduled for March 2003.

About The Author:

Marie Ross is a successful author and regular contributor to http://www.wedding-rings-n-bands.com. Find beautiful weddings rings and bands including diamond, titanium, celtic, platinum and special designs.