Description

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The first exploration of the artistic and cultural intersections of the African continent and the Byzantine world

Medieval art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire, but less known are the profound artistic contributions of Nubia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had an indelible impact on the medieval Mediterranean world. Bringing together more than 170 masterworks in a range of media and techniques—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, panel paintings, and religious manuscripts—Africa and Byzantium recounts Africa’s centrality in transcontinental networks of trade and cultural exchange. With incisive scholarship and new photography of works rarely or never before seen in public, this long-overdue publication sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of late antique Africa. It reconsiders the continent’s contributions to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of Africa as a vibrant, multiethnic society of diverse languages and faiths that played a crucial role in the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.
 
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(November 19, 2023–March 3, 2024)

The Cleveland Museum of Art
(April 14–July 21, 2024)
 

About the Author

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Andrea Myers Achi is Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Praise For…

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“This splendid exhibition was gotten underway by Helen C. Evans, who . . . has stunned the public with exhibitions of the art of Byzantium and its relations with its immediate neighbors. . . . The catalog, skillfully edited by Andrea Myers Achi, reaches even farther: across the Mediterranean shore of Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, and from Gaza to the sources of the Nile.”—Peter Brown, New York Review of Books