Empire of The Spirit; Byzantium is still alive in an ambitious new exhibit.("Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)," at New York's Metropolitan Museum )

Byline: Vibhuti Patel

Byzantium describes so many myths and so many important periods of the sacred arts that it's sometimes hard to remember that it also describes what once was a living, breathing city. Even as a place name, however, Byzantium is merely the first in a long history of avatars. Founded in the seventh century B.C. on the Bosphorus, where Asia and Europe meet, the city was renamed Constantinople, or New Rome, in A.D. 330. Under the auspices of a powerful church, New Rome fostered a flowering of the arts until marauding Crusaders sacked it in 1204. Michael VIII Palaiologos reclaimed the city for the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1261, and his dynasty ruled for 200 years, fostering a revival of the sacred arts. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks took over and called the city Istanbul, the name it holds today.

Since then the name Byzantium has symbolized the lost glory of the Hellenic culture of the Orthodox Church. Its value today, however, goes further than its Christian mysticism or its monumental icons: Byzantine art would go on to inspire future masters. Renaissance painters like Gerard David and El Greco, 19th-century impressionists like Cezanne and Gauguin, and 20th-century masters like Picasso and W. B. Yeats are all indebted to Byzantium's legacy.

This iconic Byzantium is celebrated in a vast new exhibit, "Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)," at New York's Metropolitan Museum this spring. Two previous Met exhibits featured the earlier history and arts of Byzantium; this one glories in its awesome late artifacts. Pictures like "The Cambrai Madonna," mistakenly valued as a relic painted by Saint Luke, is now considered a late Byzantine Virgin of Tenderness, hugging a baby Jesus who looks out at us. It launched later Madonnas like David's ...