The golden glow of religious belief

El Greco’s “Christ on the Cross” is a painting Mel Gibson would hate. There’s nowhere near enough blood, just a few meager trickles around the three stubby nails in the hands and feet.

Extreme human suffering is not this crucifixion’s theme. Painted in Spain in the final years of the 1500s, it instead splits the difference between mortality and divinity.

El Greco gave the waxen body of Jesus an icy blue pallor, which reeks of the morgue. Yet he posed the figure in an elegant, sinuous S-curve, like the flame of a flickering candle. The figure looks up and away from the skull and bones deposited at the base of the cross, while his outstretched arms lift up the swollen landscape into a swirl of dramatic clouds. This Jesus wavers between hot and cold -- between the living and the dead.

“Christ on the Cross” is the final work in the final gallery of “Byzantium: Faith and Power (1262-1557),” an immense -- and stunning -- exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although El Greco’s picture falls beyond the dates in the show’s title by 40 years, its inclusion makes a powerful point.

The story of Byzantine art after the fall of Constantinople to the Romans has long been overshadowed by the slow, triumphant rise of the Italian Renaissance. El Greco, born Domenico Theotokopoulos on the island of Crete, was deeply influenced by what he saw in his travels through Italy. But he was also profoundly inspired by the enduring Byzantine example.

An icon painter in his youth, El Greco grew up at the crossroads of the Latin Roman Catholic West and the Greek Orthodox East. From Rome he took the Mannerist distortions of form that Michelangelo pioneered. But the core of a work like “Christ on the Cross” is devotional mysticism, and it was inspired less by Neo-Platonic theories espoused in Renaissance Italy than by his deep Byzantine heritage. The Met’s exhibition flings open a new door on previously familiar art.

The show also assumes an unplanned edge of topicality, as the largely Muslim nation of Iraq currently stands occupied by an army composed largely of Christians. Constantinople, situated on the straits of the Bosporus at the hinge of East and West, fell to the forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Like a drop of mercury pressed beneath a thumb, nine centuries of Byzantine cultural tradition were soon dispersed from a single imperial center to a host of regional cities around the Eastern Mediterranean. When a Byzantine general reclaimed Constantinople in 1261-- starting date for the Met’s exhibition -- he did it behind the banner of a famous icon of the Virgin Mary. A wide regional network was then in place to spread the Byzantine aesthetic far and wide.

Mostly, though, the show is devoted to reviving broad interest in a cultural period that, compared to Renaissance Europe, has been overlooked for a long time. (This is the third in a series of Met exhibitions on the subject -- and the most effective.) It illuminates the unfamiliar in a sumptuous, beautifully articulated exhibition of rare Byzantine liturgical objects, textiles, sculptures, mosaics and -- especially and most gloriously -- paintings. In fact, if the show has a fault, it’s one of excess.

Somewhere in the middle you find yourself pondering the very strange question: Can a show be too much of a good thing? “Byzantium” is huge. It includes 355 works of art. They range from tiny seals in lead and gold barely an inch and a half in diameter to an enormous cast copper chandelier nearly 12 feet across, which would hang in the circular space beneath a church dome -- architecturally, part crown and part halo.

Any attempt to absorb that much in one sitting is futile, if not deranged. After a while, the power of Byzantine art starts to be subsumed by the power of the mighty Metropolitan, with its astounding ability to negotiate loans. Works come from far-flung museums in 30 nations and from sacred sites that have never lent their treasures before.

The show is installed thematically, with sections on objects of private devotion, the Orthodox liturgy, icon painting, the 6th century monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt -- the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world -- and more. The final room (where the El Greco is found) includes 31 paintings and numerous drawings and manuscripts by a variety of exceptional Renaissance artists, who mostly worked outside Italy.

They include Robert Campion, Gerard David, Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. A fully satisfying “show within a show,” which alone would be the envy of most museums, it forcefully connects Spanish and Northern Renaissance art to Byzantine traditions.

Those traditions are very different from the naturalism and illusionism that took hold in Europe. Abstraction plays a more dramatic role. Linearity and pattern emphasize two dimensions, not three. The folds of drapery in a cloak will be composed of incised or painted lines, while an ornate fabric pattern might remain smooth and unbroken across a row of pleats.

Forms are flattened, and figures are set against a light- reflective gold ground. The dazzling gold doesn’t dissolve the space; instead it glorifies the luxurious material quality of the painted wooden panel.

And that’s the point. An icon of the Virgin, Jesus, Moses or a saint had no need for convincing illusions, even when a saint’s garment is seen to billow or a modulation in tonality suggests the curvature of a cheek or protrusion of a nose. For icons are neither window on the world nor mirror of it. Self-referential, they assert themselves instead as pictures.

The term “icon” comes from the Greek eikona, meaning image. Icons do point to the pantheon of characters in the Christian story, but only in the way that a written word might do: as a symbol or abstraction. Their true power resides within the physicality of the image -- a material object right here, right now, right in front of your eyes. In its gravity, conviction and miraculous beauty, the icon is a tangible link to the absent saint.

Now that is power.

It also helps explain why Byzantine art of the period has been so long overlooked in the West.

Devotional mysticism requires no anchor in human time and space. Gold ground paintings depict timelessness and unearthly space. Change, innovation, evolution, progress -- life’s daily flux is not a pressing concern. Except in small ways the art does not try to represent it.

This creates a certain sameness across the length and breadth of Byzantine art.

A specialist can tell the difference between, say, a 13th century Slavic icon of the head of Jesus shown imprinted on a towel (called a “Mandylion”) and another one painted in Russia 250 years later. But a layman probably couldn’t.

The differences are in the details, not in the bigger picture. They attest to local quirks, like differences in available materials or types of workshop skills. Byzantine art is about the assertion of orthodoxy, and orthodoxy means a struggle for stasis. Eternal truth doesn’t change.

Try that test of difference with Italian Renaissance art. Compare the fresco of the “Last Judgment” painted by Giotto in Padua’s Arena Chapel around 1310 with the “Last Judgment” by Michelangelo in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, finished 250 years later. The subject is the same, but even an untrained eye can see that Giotto’s visual universe is light-years apart from Michelangelo’s.

Indeed, the simple fact that we know the names of Giotto and Michelangelo, while the Byzantine artists in the Met’s show are almost all anonymous, underscores the point. (Tellingly, Mandylions were often believed not to have been painted by human hands.) Italian Renaissance painters were acutely conscious of their place in human history. Byzantine painters were acutely conscious of their place in God’s eternity.

This difference tells us something. “Byzantium” (through July 4) is in part a powerful exhibition because the Byzantine aesthetic looks more contemporary today than it has for a very long time. Our lack of interest in history, our self-referential obsessions and our political allegiances to orthodoxy, whether on the right or the left, make this pungent art both strangely familiar and fascinating. Our icons might be more in the mode of Warhol-style celebrities than Christian saints -- “The Passion of the Christ” revered more as a Hollywood blockbuster than as a deeply spiritual vision. But they are no less gripping for it.