Its hard to decide what is most remarkable about "Byzantium: Faith and Power, 1261-1557," at the Metropolitan Museum. Its astonishing that the museum has once again assembled an extraordinary group of rarely or never-before-seen treasures—icons, manuscripts, textiles, architectural fragments, and more—many from obscure, remote collections in troubled places. (This is the third in the Mets series of exhibitions examining, chronologically, the achievements of the Eastern empire of Constantinople and the Greek Christian world.) Even more astonishing than the fact that is not only that any of the diverse works in the show survived is that they were created in the first place. Even more astonishing is that any of the diverse works in the show survived or that they were made in the first place, given the turbulent history of the period under review. The opulent survey encompasses the turbulent history of the final two centuries of the Byzantine em ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase