Brilliant and hermetic, Byzantine art exhibitions have glittered across the millennial decade (1993–2004), leaving us to ponder what they have altered or reclaimed. The groundbreaking exhibition held in Athens in 1964 claimed in its title, Byzantine Art, an European Art. “Why?” rejoined Greek critic Iannes Tsarouches. “Why not call Byzantine art an American art? This isn’t paradoxical: from a certain point of view Byzantium has much more in common with America than Europe” (“Parataires Skepseis Enos Episkepte tes Ektheseos vyzantines Technes,” E Epitheorese Technes 113 [1964]: 388). But in the United States, Byzantine studies seem to Robert Ousterhout “semi-marginalized,” unable to claim position either as our own or as other (“An Apologia for Byzantine Architecture,” Gesta 35 [1996]: 21). Ideological partisanship is precisely what critics missed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Glory of Byzantium exhibition in 1997, and an attitude of spectator neutrality was yet far more calculated in exhibitions mounted in France and England, which displayed not Byzantium as such, but the ways its artifacts had been collected. Ownership is, by contrast, the passionate claim of Sinai, Byzantium, Russia: Orthodox Art from the Sixth to the Twentieth Century, the catalogue of an exhibition of 496 items or clusters...