Met Percent: Week Seven [by Alec Bernstein]

Byzantine Leads to Gothic

Sarcophagus, Byzantine, early 300s, gallery 300    Capital with Four Heads, Gothic, 1225–50, gallery 304

Just never saw it that way

1,000 years from the end of Rome to the Renaissance: the gigantic new Christian colloid of Rome, Greece, Persia, Scandinavia, England, Syria: no wonder I never saw the connections . . . and the imagery was a continuum of  controversy. 

 

“The human spirit cannot keep on floating in this infinity of formless ideas; they must be compiled for it into a definite picture after its own pattern.” - Montaigne

 

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget

 - “Byzantium”, William Butler Yeats

 

“As a living man does not have to give reasons for his breathing, he does not need to explain his beliefs.” - Montaigne

 

“It’s Byzantine”

 

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling, Germany, 1220-30, gallery 300

It’s too too complex is the consensus.

• “Pension savers caught out by ‘byzantine’ tax-relief rules,” reads a headline in The Times of London.
• “Experience in byzantine water policy key in elections at Coachella Valley agencies,” says an editorial in the Desert Sun.
• “It’s Complicated: Bosnia’s Byzantine System Of Government,” puns Radio Free Europe.

 

The Formats of Old Friends . . . The Storyboard

Ivory Altarpiece, ca. 1390–1400, Italy, gallery 306

Stories in units in framed cells. Time divided into sequence in space. Grids of progression. The DNA for films, graphic novels, cartoons, comics . . . 

Stories in Light

Stained Glass Panels, 15th C., German, gallery 306

Q: How do you tell those biblical stories - Mary as Virgin, Queen, Bride, Mother, Intercessor - to a largely illiterate congregation? 

A: Stained glass.

I have heard that the origin of the term kike comes from Jewish immigrants at Ellis Island who would not sign their names with crosses (X), and signed instead with small circles: kikel or kikeleh in Yiddish shortened to kike, i.e. the people who make little circles.

 

The Articles We “Know”

The Last Supper, ca. 1500–1530, German or South Netherlandish, gallery 305

Yes, of course. The Last Supper, The Apostles, The Annunciation, The Madonna, The Child, The Pieta . . . familiar, the stuff of Western Civ. Not “chapter and verse” to me, but by osmosis in school, by television, and my childhood neighbors on their way home from Catechism.

In Los Angeles I discovered all the freeways have articles; a Spanish influence. New Yorkers take 95 to 395. Angelenos take The 405 to The 101.

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