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Onassis Cultural Center Opens Transition to Christianity. Art of Late Antiquity

The vibrant and complex life of the Eastern Mediterranean during a time of reinvention and renewal will be the subject of a major new exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in Midtown Manhattan.


Part of an icon of Christ, 6th-7th century. Encaustic on wood. Benaki Museum, Athens.

On view from December 7, 2011 through May 14, 2012, Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd – 7th Century AD will bring together 170 exceptional objects on loan from Greek museums, as well as museums in Cyprus and the United States. Incorporating many outstanding works of art that have never before been seen outside Greece, as well as recently discovered works that are being exhibited for the first time anywhere, Transition to Christianity reveals a period of extraordinary and perhaps unexpected creativity in the Greek world of Late Antiquity.

The exhibition is jointly organized by the Onassis Foundation (USA) and the Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, with the academic support of an advisory committee from the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. Curators of the exhibition are Eugenia Chalkia, Director, Byzantine and Christian Museum, and Anastasia Lazaridou, Deputy Director, Byzantine and Christian Museum. Serving on the Princeton advisory committee are Peter Brown, Professor of History, Emeritus; Slobodan Ćurčić, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Emeritus; and Dimitri Gondicas, Executive Director, Program in Hellenic Studies. Slobodan Ćurčić also serves as chief curatorial consultant.

The extraordinary objects in the exhibition represent a wide range of media and functions: mosaics, wall paintings, sculptures, architectural elements, inscriptions, coins, liturgical objects, jewelry and domestic furnishings. Together, they reveal the creative ferment of the world of Late Antiquity, when a new society, religion and material culture were gradually replacing the old.

According to Peter Brown, Transition to Christianity reflects a change in recent decades in the way scholars view the period when the sun was setting on the Western Roman Empire. “There was life after the third century; and this life came to bear the name of ’Late Antiquity,’” he writes. “This exhibition is devoted, in large part, to showing the strange and colorful life of an age which had once been consigned to the shadows, as an age of death and gloom…. Here was an other story, told under an other, more peaceful, eastern sky: the preparation, throughout the territories still ruled from Constantinople by Roman emperors, of a Byzantine civilization that would last for a further millennium.”

“It was the last and the most open of the great ages of antiquity,” Peter Brown continues. “Of this great story, an exhibition can show only fragments…. These poignant fragments of a long-lost age speak to us directly of what it was like, on the ground, to live through an era of mighty transition.”

The Onassis Cultural Center is open to the public Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm, except Christmas and New Year’s Day. Admission is free. – www.onassisusa.org

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