Once upon a time

intriguing comparisons between past and present.

TWO new exhibitions at the British Museum this winter demonstrate the

museum's commitment to scholarship and to a wider general audience. Both

exhibitions succeed in raising fundamental questions about the

relationship between the museum and its public.

The lively exhibition in the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery attempts to

forge links between the past and present, displaying specially

commissioned works by a dozen contemporary artists alongside the

permanent exhibition. Focusing on contemporary debates about how to

display the past and make it meaningful to a present-day audience, the

museum has succeeded in creating a series of intriguing comparisons.

The exhibition was launched at the end of October with a temporary

display by the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy which lasted for three days

made from 30 tons of compacted yellow sand snaking around the permanent

collection.

Now the links between the old and new are suggested by the huge Red

Granite Head from a Colossal Figure of a King from Thebes, from the

eighteenth dynasty (circa 1390 BC), shown alongside Iron Shadows, a

seven-foot-high sculpture by Igor Mitoraj which is based on the same

regular facial features as the original but produced in fragmented and

rusted cast iron.

At the back of the exhibition Alexander Mihaylovich's 20-ft-high oil

painting Colossus of Menes dominates the show. Perhaps the work which

best summarises the museum's aims, however, is Frog by Marc Quinn. A

live North American woodfrog, able to survive freezing during winter

hibernation, has been suspended inside a perspex head above a gleaming

refrigeration unit. As a centrepiece to the exhibition it works well,

suggesting the kind of rebirth that lies at its heart.

If this is the public face of the British Museum, the exhibition

across the corridor could not be more different. Clustered together in a

few rooms is a small silent collection of beautiful relics from

Byzantium. The achievements of the Byzantine empire which flourished for

over a millennium as successor to the Roman Empire in the eastern

Mediterannean -- which also established the Orthodox Church -- are

represented by a peerless selection of artefacts from British

collections.

Icons, jewellery, illuminated manuscripts, fragments of architecture,

and textiles chart the progress of a recognisably Christian art from its

establishment in the fifth century through to late sixteenth-century

items from Mount Athos.

The exhibition concentrates on the creation of Constantinople as the

capital and administrative centre of Byzantium from its inauguration in

330 and gradual emergence as the New Rome.

The final room is devoted to exquisite examples of Byzantine art

produced after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, largely from Crete

which was a Venetian colony until 1665. The fifteenth-century Icon of

the Nativity or the Icon of St John the Baptist are both beautiful and

painstakingly crafted works.

One of the main messages from the works on display and from the

photographs of Byzantine architecture is the way in which existing art

forms from Jewish, pagan, and secular cultures were all pressed into

Christian service.

The relief panel representing Leda and Swan produced in Egypt in the

fourth or fifth centuries has all the uninhibited expression of the best

pagan art and makes a telling comparison with the solemnity of the

religious works.

The painted image of Saint Kollouthos, for example (also from Egypt

from a century or so later), depicts a favourite Egyptian martyr and is

painted on a thick canvas rather than the usual wood used for the other

icons.

Interestingly, the mosaic from the apse of San Michele in Africisco

Ravenna dedicated in 545 shows a smiling beardless youth which has only

recently been recognised as a depiction of Christ.

A series of stunning photographs of the architectural achievements of

Byzantium demonstrates how the Christian Church developed out of the

Roman secular tradition. The monumental sixth-century Church of

Hagiasophia, built by the Emperor Justinian, is shown in present-day

Istanbul complete with the minarets and other Islamic fittings which

were added during the building's use as a mosque from the fifteenth

century to the early twentieth century.

If the British Museum's aim is to underline the way in which we

constantly modify culture, then these two exhibitions demonstrate its

relevance in quite different but none the less effective ways.

* Time Machine: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary Art is at the British

Museum, London until February 26, 1995. Byzantium runs to April 23,

1995.