Met april 2012

Visitors look at items as part of a press preview of the 'Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition' exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, March 12, 2012. The exhibition, which is scheduled to open March 14- July 18, 2012, presents this era in the history of the eastern Mediterranean, through some 300 works of art during which at the start of the seventh century, the eastern Mediterranean—from Syria through Egypt and across North Africa—was central to the spiritual and political heart of the Byzantine Empire, ruled from Constantinople (modern Istanbul).