Byzantium in “Africa”

A major exhibition displacing Europe as the engine that shaped global Christianity is a moment to savor. Africa and Byzantium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented northern Africa as a sophisticated and equal partner in the fabrication of visual status in late antiquity instead of as it has customarily been seen, as a derivative province in the Roman world. It drew a general public’s attention to the constitutive role played by lands south of the Mediterranean in the production and circulation of luxury goods, and, through them, in the promulgation of early Christianity.