While trans-continental interventions on the African continent began with the 15th-century arrival of the Portuguese, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Africa & Byzantium exhibition demonstrates how the continent had been engaged in cross-regional interaction for much longer.
On the northern and north-eastern coasts of Africa, proximity afforded by the Mediterranean, Red and Arabian Seas facilitated exchanges of goods, ideas, belief systems and aesthetic practices.
The exhibition presents nearly 200 Medieval objects spanning geographies and temporalities usually separated by the museum's own departmental organisation. Arranged chronologically, the show identifies three crucial periods of artistic development: early Byzantine culture of the fourth to seventh centuries, the rise of Christianity in Africa between the eighth and 16th centuries, and Ethiopian and Coptic art of the 17th to 20th centuries.
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