The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) recently hosted the blockbuster exhibition, Africa & Byzantium, which ran from November 19, 2023, to March 3, 2024. This long-anticipated show and accompanying catalogue1 represent one of the first major exhibitions to place the contemporaneous arts of Byzantine, Coptic, Nubian, Ethiopian, and Islamic traditions in Africa side by side. Showcasing medieval Africa’s rich cultural heritage, complexity, power, and transcontinental influence, Africa & Byzantium will become a standard resource for scholars reevaluating Africa’s role in medieval (...) art and culture. Head curator of the exhibition, Dr. Andrea Myers Achi, has kindly agreed to an interview as a supplement to the current Convivium issue on The Arts of Medieval Northern Africa. Dr. Achi is Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art at the Met. She specializes in Late Antique and Byzantine art and archaeology in Northern Africa, particularly in Egypt. She previously worked on the Met’s exhibitions for Art and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis (October 11, 2017 – April 11, 2021), Crossroads: Power and Piety (March 6, 2020 – July 24, 2022), The Good Life: Collecting Late Antique Art at The Met (May 24, 2021 – January 7, 2024), and Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt (2024), which recently opened and will be on display through January 25, 2026. (shrink)

How did medieval art frame the desert as a sacred space? The twelfth-century Klimax panel, today at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, offers insight into this question. Inspired by John of Sinai’s Klimax (or Ladder), the work depicts monks in a cosmic struggle unfolding in the desert. It has long been associated with a site-specific “Sinai style”, even as a depiction of the St Catherine’s surround itself. This essay reconsiders the relationship between both the painting and John of Sinai’s text, (...) as well as the desert landscape. It shows that the work is a product not of Sinai but of Constantinople, and that it was meant to serve as an encomium of a monastic founder from the city. The work’s initial audience were urban monks who likely never engaged in monasticism in the desert. Why, then, did the panel pose so anachronistic adepiction of desert monasticism? The painting was not just encomiastic but also exemplary: the desert’s vast space served as a meditative model for the monastic mind. (shrink)