Art in Byzantium was used for religious expression as its ability to transcend differences in language and culture across the empire was vital for communicating the Christian view of the divine.

Ancient Greece has become so sublimated it might seem that Greek history stopped shortly after Hadrian’s visit to Athens. Yet Byzantium, acknowledged as one of the great eras of history, has had as deep an impact on the world and on Western history as Classical Greece–an impact that is still felt today. And although Byzantine art and culture was almost entirely concerned with religious expression, the diversity of the techniques, subjects, and approaches used throughout the Byzantine Empire is extraordinary. Through its collection of over 25,000 artifacts, the Byzantine Museum & Christian Museum offers visitors a glimpse of Byzantium’s glory.

Founded in 1914 as the Byzantine Museum, it was opened to the public in 1923; in recent years its title was changed to Byzantine & Christian Museum, although the addition seems superfluous given the nature of the Byzantine Empire. The museum was originally housed in the basement of the Academy of Athens before moving, in 1930, to the Villa Ilissia, formerly the mansion of the Sophie de Marbois-Lebrun, the Duchesse of Plaisance. Designed and built in 1848 by Stamatis Kleanthes in the style of a Florentine palace, the two-story main building rises at the end of a paved quadrangle that features a reproduction of a fountain from the mosaics at the Daphni Monastery. In 1993, construction began on a new wing–and underground exhibition of space of some 12,000 square meters that extends as far as the southern end of Rigillis Park on Leoforos Vassileos Constantinou. The new wing is used mainly for temporary exhibitions, but the permanent collection deserves attention too.

The Byzantine Empire spanned a period of roughly eight centuries. Its first period began with the transfer by Constantine the Great of the Roman Empire’s capital from Rome to Constantinople in 330 C.E. and lasted through the iconoclast period. The empire’s latter period, which scholars often refer to as its second Golden Age, runs from the end of the iconoclast period in the ninth century through the sacking of Constantinople in the thirteenth century. It was during this second period that the Byzantine Empire’s reach extended from North Africa all the way east to Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia. The conversion of the Slavs to Christianity is considered by many Western historians to be the Byzantine Empire’s greatest contribution to the world.

Byzantium emerged as the bridge between antiquity and the Renaissance. The Byzantine Museum’s holdings are grouped in six collections: sculpture, icons, miniature arts, frescoes, ceramics, and textiles. Because of the rigid focus on religious rather than personal expression, Byzantine artists were forced to concentrate on style and form instead of content. The result is a uniformity in the art produced during the Byzantine era but also a far greater depth and sophistication.

Byzantine artists do not seem to have shared the ancient Greeks’ penchant for sculpture. What little sculpture was produced during the Byzantine era tended mostly towards small relief carvings, many in ivory. From the Byzantine Museum’s sculpture exhibits, there seems to have been a chronological progression from three-dimensional forms to two-dimensional reliefs and almost flat surfaces with barely raised designs and inscriptions.

The museum’s sculpture collection is just a fraction of its holdings–some 2,000 pieces in all, dating from the third century to the eighteenth. Most are from sites around greater Athens, either recovered from abandoned churches or ancient shrines such as the Thisseio that were subsequently converted to Christian temples of worship. Look for a delightful eleventh-century relief of a Centaur playing a lyre to accompany a dancer; a thirteenth-century marble arch depicting the “Descent into Hell,” featuring Christ with Adam and Eve on one side and David, Solomon, and St John on the other; and a relief carving of the “Tree of Life” flanked by two lions, with a cufic inscription around the border, dated to the ninth century. One of the museum’s prized possessions is a fragment of a carved fourth-century stele from Aegina depicting Orpheus surrounded by real and fictitious animals, among them a lion devouring a gazelle.

Another interesting exhibit from the permanent collection are recreations of church interiors such as a typical cruciform church with cupola and a post-Byzantine church with flat ceiling. The marble sections used to recreate the cruciform church span the eleventh to the thirteenth century, including a floor mosaic of a Phoenix. The sections of post-Byzantine churches are from various regions of Greece and span the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Exhibits include fragments of wall paintings recovered from abandoned or collapsed churches.

Byzantine art was quite effective in expressing the Christian view of the divine, as it was able to transcend the differences in language and culture across the Byzantine Empire. The vehicle for this spiritual and artistic expression was the human figure. Building on Greco-Roman tradition, Byzantine painters developed their themes around the human figure in contrast to the Islamic fixation on calligraphic shapes and the Western Europeans’ obsession with animals. This concentration on the human figure allowed the Byzantine artists to develop a completely new imagery with Christ at its center. And since icons were representations of intangible religious beliefs rather than a depiction of an actual occurrence, Byzantine painting teetered between the realist and the abstract. This is not to say that the human forms drawn on the icons were devoid of human emotion; St Hierousaleim (Jerusalem), flanked by her three sons in a fourteenth-century icon has a look that seems a little too circumspect, and perhaps even sly, for a holy being.

The permanent collection features some fine examples of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century icons. A double-sided icon featuring a crucifixion dated between the tenth and thirteenth century on one side and a fifteenth-century Virgin with Child highlights the subtle change in style in the period between each icon. By the fifteenth century, figures and faces had become more rounded, lines simpler and looser; the eyes, however, had become even more expressive, albeit more deeply sorrowful.

Color–especially gold and extremely bold primaries such as red or blue–were skillfully used by Byzantine painters for effect. Gold was often used in frescoes as a backdrop to figures to emphasize their distance from the material world. In a fifteenth-century icon of St Marina, the brilliant red and gold contrast sharply with the darkness of the figure, adding depth. The richness of the Byzantine painters’ palettes can also be seen in mosaics, which during Byzantium approximated paintings. An exquisite example included in the museum’s collection is the portrait of the Virgin “Episkepsis” (visitation), dating from the late thirteenth century.

Gold was also widely used in miniature art while craftsmen also worked lustrous materials such as mother of pearl into artifacts, highlighting the splendor and opulence of the Byzantine court. An assortment of articles–jewelry, coins, seals and a collection of silver vessels known as the “Mytilene treasure”–and exquisitely embroidered vestments also offer insight into the more corporeal workings of the Byzantine Empire. These exhibits represent just a fraction of the Byzantine Museum’s collection but are enough to whet the visitor’s appetite for more.

Byzantine & Christian Museum Vassilissis Sophias 22 Evangelismos tel.: 213 213 9572 Open Tuesday-Sunday 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. (November-April) and Monday 1:30 p.m.-8 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday 8 a.m.-8 p.m. (May-October), excluding state holidays; admission €4 Highlights: Permanent exhibition on the Byzantine Empire