The Prophets, Angels, & Churches of 'Armenia!'- The New York Review

• 11.22.2018, 09:00
•  World,  Armenia,  No-politics

Photo by Hrair Hawk Khatcherian and Lilit Khachatryan

One small display in an exhibition can grab you by the collar. In the case of “Armenia!” at the Metropolitan Museum, it was the image of a spherical wide-eyed crab in a ridged armor swallowing Alexander the Great, along with his ship and retinue, set against a wavy sea that might have been drawn by a child. It is attributed to Zak‘ariay of Gnunik and appears in an illuminated manuscript of the Alexander Romance (1538–1544), the legends surrounding the exploits of Alexander the Great, much loved by Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Armenians alike. Dr. Helen Evans, the Met’s curator of Byzantine Art, told me, “That crab is too good not to be recognized as the type of art we don’t expect from East Christians.” And it most definitely wasn’t, she added, “the stiff art of the Byzantines that Vasari disapproved of.” Giorgio Vasari, the Italian architect, painter, and historian, author of Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) Western culture’s first art historian, who coined the use of the term “Renaissance,” unfairly saw in Byzantine abstractions, coming after Greek and Roman art, a decline in skills rather than an artistic choice, the New York Review reports.

The exhibition opened with the Primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America blessing the occasion by singing, with two others, an allelujah in a voice that filled the galleries with the sound of Armenian liturgical chants. There are one hundred and forty objects in the show, including jewelry and reliquaries, as well as church models, illustrated manuscripts, and textiles for liturgical use—one fourteen-foot-long red and gold “omophorion” of interwoven square crosses is reminiscent of the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich’s crosses on canvas and icons on paper. The objects on display range from the fourth to the seventeenth centuries and represent the different regions Armenians inhabited, from their homeland at the base of Mount Ararat, to the kingdom of Cilicia, and further East to New Julfa, in Iran. Armenia was one of the first states to adopt the Christian religion—as early as AD 301—and its history has been defined both by this, its status as an outpost of Eastern Orthodox religion surrounded by Muslim neighbors, and by its role in establishing trade routes from China and India to Western Europe, and from Egypt and the Holy Land to Russia.

The exclamation mark following the word “Armenia” in the exhibition’s title—Evans’s idea—was meant to convey her surprise that Armenian art and culture aren’t studied more or better known. A champion of what she calls “this edge of Byzantium that is Armenian art and culture,” Evans has been wanting to assemble a show such as this one ever since she began researching her dissertation on Armenian manuscripts of the kingdom of Cilicia almost forty years ago. (She has also curated other Byzantine blockbusters at the Met: “The Glory of Byzantium” (1997), “Byzantium: Faith and Power” (2004), and “Byzantium and Islam” (2012).)