ArtJune 2012 Hidden affinities by Eric Ormsby On “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. To step into the discreetly illumined rooms of the major new Byzantine exhibition at the Met is to experience, with a gentle shock, some of the wide-eyed wonder which early visitors to the court at Constantinople felt well over a millennium ago.1 When the priest Liutprand of Cremona, serving as an envoy from a Western potentate, had an audience with Constantine VII in the year 949, he was amazed to see the Byzantine emperor suddenly hoisted skyward on his throne by means of some hidden mechanical device and, indeed, to such a height that poor awed Liutprand could not converse with him. Moreover, as he tells us, “before the emperor’s seat stood a tree, made of bronze gilded over, whose branches were filled with birds, also made of gilded bronze, which uttered different cries, each accordi ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 30 June 2012, on page 47 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Hidden-affinities-7405
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Hints, fragments & scintillations by Eric Ormsby on Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1820-1842 (Library of America) & Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1841-1877 (Library of America) by Ralph Waldo Emerson,Lawrence Rosenwald by Karen Wilkin On “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. On "Man Ray: Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery, London. by Mario Naves On "The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913” at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ.
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