This volume of thirteen essays arose from the exhibition Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, which traveled between 2013 and 2015 from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles, before a reduced version visited Chicago. That apparently self-evident basis for the volume is indicated in the title. The papers view objects, and in some cases objects from the exhibition itself, and they view Greece, as the state entity that preserves and treasures such objects constituting its Hellenic and Christian patrimony. That title is unproblematized. Echoing the title of Gerstel’s 2013 edited volume (the important Viewing the Morea), it fails here to move beyond the generalized meanings of viewing into consistently focused approaches. Likewise, Greece’s heritage was richly demonstrated through the exhibition and in this volume, but it is also left unexamined for its ideological roots in culture and politics, to cite two adjectives in the subtitle. No exhibition is obvious, except in the sense that it might stand in the way of exposing deeper structures of the societies that produce and consume them. In that sense, agency is ultimately left unattributed.

Three essays in the volume deal with exhibition, two on the staging of that show at the National Gallery and at the Getty Villa by two curators in charge of these installations, and a last a retrospective essay by an art historian well experienced in the organization and production of exhibitions of Byzantine art. This cluster of essays is a welcome inclusion, since reflections by curators on their work of presenting the past in objects to a contemporary audience are not common. Students looking back on exhibition histories will find good material here for analysis, but not much analysis in itself, as the unhelpful titles indicate (“Notes” and “Curating Exhibitions,” to take the first words of two). As so often happens with the display of Byzantine art, unexamined sacralization of museum space is embraced, so that the editor can claim that “the presence of icons and liturgical vessels transformed the museum setting into a site of encounter with the holy, conjuring a rich heritage kept alive by the Church” (7). Folding museum stagecraft and ecclesiastical agency together, she notes the use of photographs, lighting, and dense spacing of objects to contextualize, evoke, and mimic sacred space in Orthodoxy. Whose agency (or agencies) might be at play in these highly constructed environments is left an unexplored question.

Other “viewing” sections include islands, a cluster of articles by Veronica della Dora, Patricia Fortini Brown, and Sean Roberts, that deal with the early modern Mediterranean in ways that will be of interest to readers of this journal particularly. Della Dora examines the creative geographies of Greece in the illustrated “island books” of Thomaso Porcacchi in 1572. Beautifully illustrated, as is typical throughout this volume, this essay takes the position that “the island becomes a mirror of the macrocosm, as well as a mirror of dystopian anxieties and utopian desires” (187). Each of these essays is learned, deeply annotated, and yet leaves possibilities unexplored; these areas of research have rich potential. Fortini Brown models exemplary scholarly energy and care in establishing that the Venetian loggia form in Crete, Cyprus, and Corfu was “seemingly accessible, but in reality … privileged spaces that defined who was in and who was out” (233). Roberts’s essay takes on “Rhodes’ mutable and imaginative presence within early modern visual culture” (237) and situates the island at the border and limit not only of an imaginary geography, but also of a version of Christendom.

Each of these essays in this volume has Hellenic riches to offer, from Annemarie Weyl Carr’s beautifully expressive meditation on the “medium of the miraculous” in icon painting to Michalis Kappas’s positioning of the Mani in the cultural landscape of the Peloponnese. Byzantinists have clear reason to mine these riches, and early modern specialists, likewise, have much to gain from journeying to the eastern Mediterranean by way of such possibilities the exhibition presents. The productive qualities of viewing are revealed here, even if conceptual ramifications of various viewing positions remained unexplored.