Medieval Practices of Space

Medieval Practices of Space

Author: Barbara A. Hanawalt

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781452904672

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The contributors to this volume cross disciplinary and theoretical boundaries to read the words, metaphors, images, signs, poetic illusions, and identities with which medieval men and women used space and place to add meaning to the world.


The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture

Author: Ellen C. Schwartz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-11-19

Total Pages: 665

ISBN-13: 0197572200

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Byzantine art has been an underappreciated field, often treated as an adjunct to the arts of the medieval West, if considered at all. In illustrating the richness and diversity of art in the Byzantine world, this handbook will help establish the subject as a distinct field worthy of serious inquiry. Essays consider Byzantine art as art made in the eastern Mediterranean world, including the Balkans, Russia, the Near East and north Africa, between the years 330 and 1453. Much of this art was made for religious purposes, created to enhance and beautify the Orthodox liturgy and worship space, as well as to serve in a royal or domestic context. Discussions in this volume will consider both aspects of this artistic creation, across a wide swath of geography and a long span of time. The volume marries older, object-based considerations of themes and monuments which form the backbone of art history, to considerations drawing on many different methodologies-sociology, semiotics, anthropology, archaeology, reception theory, deconstruction theory, and so on-in an up-to-date synthesis of scholarship on Byzantine art and architecture. The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture is a comprehensive overview of a particularly rich field of study, offering a window into the world of this fascinating and beautiful period of art.


Byzantine Materiality

Byzantine Materiality

Author: Evan Freeman

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 3110980738

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This volume explores the power of matter and materials in the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium. Recent attention to matter as dynamic and meaningful constitutes an emerging, interdisciplinary field of inquiry known as materiality, new materialism, or the material turn. Materials can be symbolic, but matter can also act on human subjects. This volume builds on these insights to consider the role of matter, materials, form, and embodied experiences in Byzantium. In many respects, Byzantine materiality represents a continuation of its Greco-Roman inheritance, which was also shared by neighboring peoples such as the Umayyads and Abbasids. But the Byzantines also developed their own, unique perspectives on matter and form, as with their parsing of the sacred materialities of icons, the Eucharist, and relics. Chapters in this volume consider the cultural meanings and functions of materials such as gold and ivory, the materiality of icons and relics, experiences of objects, as well as Byzantine philosophies of matter and form. Materiality takes center stage in Byzantine constructions of power, luxury, belief, and identity, which will be of interest to scholars and students of Byzantium and the wider medieval world.


The Framing of Sacred Space

The Framing of Sacred Space

Author: Jelena Bogdanovic

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-06-19

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0190681373

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The Framing of Sacred Space offers the first topical study of canopies as essential spatial and symbolic units in Byzantine-rite churches. Centrally planned columnar structures--typically comprised of four columns and a roof--canopies had a critical role in the modular processes of church design, from actual church furnishings in the shape of a canopy to the church's structural core. As architectonic objects of basic structural and design integrity, canopies integrate an archetypical image of architecture and provide means for an innovative understanding of the materialization of the idea of the Byzantine church and its multi-focal spatial presence. The Framing of Sacred Space considers both the material and conceptual framing of sacred space and explains how the canopy bridges the physical and transcendental realms. As a crucial element of church design in the Byzantine world, a world that gradually abandoned the basilica as a typical building of Roman imperial secular architecture, the canopy carried tectonic and theological meanings and, through vaulted, canopied bays and recognizable Byzantine domed churches, established organic architectural, symbolic, and sacred ties between the Old and New Covenants. In such an overarching context, the canopy becomes an architectural parti, a vital concept and dynamic design principle that carries the essence of the Byzantine church. The Framing of Sacred Space highlights significant factors in understanding canopies through specific architectural settings and the Byzantine concepts of space, thus also contributing to larger debates about the creation of sacred space and related architectural taxonomy.


Vested Angels

Vested Angels

Author: Maurice Basil McNamee

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 9789042900073

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Mc Namee's detailed and well illustrated new study is about eucharistic symbolism in Early Netherlandish painting. It focuses on the pervading presence of the vested angel in this school of painting and its eucharistic significance. These angels, dressed in every possible variation of the vestements of the subministers of the traditional Solemn High Mass, are represented as serving the Christ in each episode of His life. The history of the vested angel is traced through numerous paintings representing scenes from the life of Christ' from the Annunciation through the Last Judgement. The theological basis of this study is offered in a discussion of Maurice de la Taille's Mysterium Fidei, a theory of Mass that best parallels the concept of Eucharistic symbolism in Early Netherlandish painting. Colour illustrations and over a hundred photographs of the original paintings help the reader to follow this fascinating analysis.


Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World

Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World

Author: Eva R. Hoffman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-02-09

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1405182075

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Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World is a much-needed teaching anthology that rethinks and broadens the scope of the stale and limiting classifications used for Early Christian-Byzantine visual arts. A comprehensive anthology offering a new approach to the visual arts classified as Early Christian-Byzantine Comprised of essays from experts in the field that integrate the newer, historiographical research into 'the canon' of established scholarship Exposes the historical, geographical and cultural continuities and interactions in the visual arts of the late antique and medieval Mediterranean world Covers an extensive range of topics, including the effect that converging cultures in late antiquity had on art, the cultural identities that can be observed by looking at difference of tradition in visual art, and the variance of illuminations in holy books


The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome

The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome

Author: Erik Thunø

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-04-20

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1107069904

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This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome and engages topics including time, intercession, materiality, repetition, and vision.


The Viking Road to Byzantium

The Viking Road to Byzantium

Author: H.R. Ellis Davidson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-10

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1000921271

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The Viking Road to Byzantium (1976) is a major study of the Vikings who travelled east, based on the evidence of written sources and archaeology. Clues to the movements of the eastern Vikings may be found not only in Icelandic skaldic verse and runic inscriptions on memorial stones, but in such unexpected places as a Romanian chalk quarry near the Black Sea, among the carved stones of ancient Thrace and in Constantinople itself, the Miklagard of northern literature.