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The mission of this series is to support scholarship in diverse fields under the umbrella of the creative arts. With particular interest in theater, music, film and visual culture, this series seeks to publish cutting edge cultural history that contextualize these growing areas of scholarship within the larger tapestry of the Jewish experience.
This book addresses typology of Late Antique and Byzantine art and architecture in eight wide-ranging contributions from an international group of scholars. A dialogue between type and its ultimate source, archetype, surpasses issues of formalism and conventional chronological narratives to suggest a more nuanced approach to typology as a systematic and systemic classification of types in the visual landscape of the pagans, Jews, and Christians.
Set against the contemporaneous cultural context, select examples of Mediterranean material culture confirm the great importance of type-and-archetype constructs for theoretical discourse on architecture and visual arts. Contributors are Anna Adashinskaya, Jelena Anđelković Grašar, Jelena Bogdanović, Čedomila Marinković, Marina Mihaljević, Ljubomir Milanović, Cecilia Olovsdotter, and Ida Sinkević.
Set against the contemporaneous cultural context, select examples of Mediterranean material culture confirm the great importance of type-and-archetype constructs for theoretical discourse on architecture and visual arts. Contributors are Anna Adashinskaya, Jelena Anđelković Grašar, Jelena Bogdanović, Čedomila Marinković, Marina Mihaljević, Ljubomir Milanović, Cecilia Olovsdotter, and Ida Sinkević.
This book addresses typology of Late Antique and Byzantine art and architecture in eight wide-ranging contributions from an international group of scholars. A dialogue between type and its ultimate source, archetype, surpasses issues of formalism and conventional chronological narratives to suggest a more nuanced approach to typology as a systematic and systemic classification of types in the visual landscape of the pagans, Jews, and Christians.
Set against the contemporaneous cultural context, select examples of Mediterranean material culture confirm the great importance of type-and-archetype constructs for theoretical discourse on architecture and visual arts. Contributors are Anna Adashinskaya, Jelena Anđelković Grašar, Jelena Bogdanović, Čedomila Marinković, Marina Mihaljević, Ljubomir Milanović, Cecilia Olovsdotter, and Ida Sinkević.
Set against the contemporaneous cultural context, select examples of Mediterranean material culture confirm the great importance of type-and-archetype constructs for theoretical discourse on architecture and visual arts. Contributors are Anna Adashinskaya, Jelena Anđelković Grašar, Jelena Bogdanović, Čedomila Marinković, Marina Mihaljević, Ljubomir Milanović, Cecilia Olovsdotter, and Ida Sinkević.
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The incorruptibility of saints was understood as a sign that some of them were blessed with divine power even before they died. That the power of the saints remained active even after death gave them a paradoxical status of being neither fully dead nor alive. This phenomenon allowed them to continue to be present in everyday life. Some theologians believe that the body of Christ was a holy relic during the three days it spent in the tomb and therefore presents an archetype for holy relics. Drawing upon this area of thought, this chapter examines the role of bodily relics as a type and locates its possible prototype in the body of Christ. The case study focuses on the uncorrupted relics of the 14th-century king Stefan Dečanski in the monastery of Dečani, Serbia. Based on the king’s biography, we know that at some point after his death in 1331, his body was moved to Dečani and buried in the southwest part of the church. The king’s body was later translated in a solemn ritual from his tomb to the front of the main chancel barrier. Here, the remains were deposited in a wooden coffin, probably underneath the icon of Christ. The displaying of relics before the iconostasis, as is the case in Dečani, should be considered in light of the symbolic meaning of the chancel barrier, and as a link between type and archetype, between the saintly relics and Christ’s body.
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Can we speak of a canopy—an architectonic object of basic structural and design integrity, most often comprising four columns and a roof—as a ‘primitive hut’ in Byzantine architecture? This chapter posits that Byzantine canopies can indeed be viewed in this way. The primitive hut—the essential architectural unit and the ideal principle for architecture—was first outlined by Vitruvius in the 1st century BCE, further theorized by Laugier in the 18th century and elaborated as a hut-tent-cave by Quatremère a century later. The role of a canopy as a hut-tent, examined within the general concepts of space and place of the Byzantines, may be extrapolated from biblical texts as well as from preserved 6th-century texts by Dionysius the Areopagite, who first introduced the philosophical notion of type and archetype, and is also manifest in texts by early Christian and Byzantine theologians, such as Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon (2nd century), and Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople (8th century). Augmented by visual and spatial models of the canopy, which were strongly related to the Ark, the Tabernacle, and the Temple, and further enriched by Christological and Marian concepts, the canopy emerges as an architectural parti, invested with its own material-immaterial complexity and particularly highlighted within the performative contexts of the religious traditions of the Byzantine-rite churches. The Byzantine canopy should be considered in relation to biblical architectural references, enhanced by the pervasive influences of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic philosophies, which reiterate the notion of Vitruvius’s hut, in contrast to the rationalist and positivist elaboration of the primitive hut by Laugier and Quatremère. In this context, the origins of the Byzantine canopy—both the hut and the tent—cannot be located in the natural world, however, but in nature as absolute, in divine creation. Yet both the canopy of the Byzantines and the primitive hut of Laugier, Quatremère, and other modern architectural thinkers promote the pursuit of the truth in the matter by giving type (shape) to the typeless (shapeless) archetype. Such an understanding of the primitive hut is also the basis for understanding tectonics in architecture as suspended between its physical and metaphysical realms. The canopy of the Byzantine-rite church can and should be understood as a ‘primitive hut,’ this chapter suggests, as a theoretical house, an intellectual exercise, an aesthetic concept, and a design principle in architecture, which is critical for including Byzantine accomplishments within revised architectural typologies and for the more inclusive systematization of architectural knowledge.
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This chapter considers the use of architectural motifs as symbolic concepts in Late Roman and Early Byzantine art. Although formally, functionally, and contextually related to built counterparts, the visual constructions discussed here do not represent actual monumental architecture, or do so only in limited and ambiguous ways. Late antique art is rich in what may be called architectural imagery, that is, figural compositions in which an architectural structure provides a visually prominent and regularizing element. Arches, portals, pedimented fronts, aedicules, and domes certainly appeared in Greco-Roman art before late antiquity, but much less frequently, and for the most part in funerary works. The significant increase of formal and contextual diversification of architectural motifs in the visual culture of late antiquity can perhaps chiefly be explained by their suitability for the hieratic and abstracted mode of representation that was developed, i.e., their usefulness in the creation of symbolic art, but they would arguably also have reflected an expanded visual conception of architecture in general, and of certain architectural types and themes as bearers of abstract meaning in particular. Indeed, examples of late antique pictorial or imaged architecture may be considered as graphic illustrations of the ideational superstructures attached to actual or built architecture in this period: physical architecture and imaged architecture were part of the same language of forms, constituting mutually reflective articulations of one ‘universal’ architectural perception. As a visual technique and a means of expression essentially unconstrained by the physical laws of tectonics, imaged architecture allowed for near limitless variation, modification, and synthesis of established architectural types and elements. The resulting creations range from the reductively abstract to the imaginatively fantastical, and often to the architectonically illogical and sometimes to the seemingly nonsensical. Yet a systematic analysis reveals clear and consistent patterns not only in their conceptual construction but also in their contextual application and relevance. Generally speaking, the function and meaning of architectural motifs in late antique art were to define and glorify man in his different roles and fields of action, and to give visual form to prevailing notions and beliefs about the nature and composition of society, the world, and the cosmos.
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The fame of the Constantinopolitan icon of the Mother of God, known as the Hodegetria, generated many replicas which were venerated in a way similar to their prototype. The presence of these Hodegetria copies in different provinces and towns of the Byzantine Empire and beyond its borders led to the emergence of numerous Hodegetria-dedicated foundations, which were usually described in sources as churches or monasteries created “for the name of the Most Holy Mother of God Hodegetria.” They were probably established for the purpose of emulating the Byzantine capital’s veneration practices and for housing copies of the Constantinopolitan icon. This can be inferred on the basis of their dedication, which reflects a shift in the Hodegon cult from the curative water fountain to the icon, presumed to be painted by the Evangelist Luke. Such foundations were aimed mostly at the transfer of a part of the famous icon’s miracle-working power through the reverence toward the icon’s copies and the imitation of rituals and religious practices associated with the Hodegetria (confraternities, processions, and so forth). The existing sources and monuments more often than not offer only faint traces of these practices and cults. This chapter, therefore, analyzes the considerable amount of known evidence about Hodegetria-associated foundations in an attempt to understand how the transfer of the icon-cult functioned. A number of selected examples representing the Byzantine urban milieu and rural periphery, and the Serbian and Bulgarian states, as well as foreign-ruled Greek territories, point to the reasons for the practice of dedicating ecclesiastic institutions to the Hodegetria. The chapter makes clear that the relationship between the Constantinopolitan Hodegetria and its replicas cannot be explained simply in terms of typology or iconography, or in the ‘original-copies’ paradigm. The veneration of the Hodegetria can appear in different forms and employ numerous and various practices. Simultaneously, the replication of images is performed not in terms of typology (the production of physical copies) but rather in terms of the relationship between an archetype and its embodiment, whereby a miraculous image preserves some of its original characteristics after replication.
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Five-domed churches have been extensively studied by Byzantine scholars. Varied in their aesthetic and structural features, the churches have been the subject of numerous discussions regarding their origins and symbolic meaning, as well as their complex spatial and architectural articulation. While distinguished for their sophisticated architectural techniques, the churches also provided fertile soil for the appearance of new iconographic elements that significantly impacted programmatic solutions and spatial articulation of the interior decoration.
This chapter aims to further our understanding of the five-domed churches in Byzantium by examining possible models or prototypes for these monuments and the ways in which they were perceived by medieval beholders. Were five-domed churches a separate group of Byzantine buildings marked by their distinctive exterior and, as such, an architectural type, or were they based on a common prototype, carrying a deeper symbolic message that would distinguish them as the manifestation of an archetypal icon? In answering these questions, the author examines structural and architectural features of the buildings, the programmatic specificities of their decorative ensembles, and literary sources relevant to understanding Byzantine perception and reception of these monuments. The chapter demonstrates that very few, if any, compositional elements in Byzantium, architectural or decorative, express purely formal and aesthetic concerns. Rather, the placement of subsidiary domes at the outermost corners of the building, along with a clearly expressed programmatic unity of the images in the domes, suggests that the five domes are not to be viewed as five isolated segments of heaven, but as a single unit, for there is only one celestial sphere and it is not fragmented. Thus, rather than copying one or any specific edifice as a model, the five-domed churches reflect the archetype of a dome, domical vault, or heavenly canopy.
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In Jewish art, Temple iconography appears by the 1st century CE on coins from the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. From then onwards, the imagery of the Temple continues to appear in different contexts in Jewish art, from frescoes in Dura-Europos, through the floor mosaics of the early Galilee synagogues, to the catacombs of Rome and Bet Shearim. Medieval representations of the Temple can be found in illuminated manuscripts, especially in the Haggadot. This chapter deals with the representation of the Temple in the 14th-century Sarajevo Haggadah. Is the Temple representation in the Sarajevo Haggadah narrative or symbolic, and what are the layers of meaning this representation conveys? How original or isolated is it in the Jewish visual arts? Are there any differences between the Temple representations in Sephardic and Ashkenazi visual imagery? What can we deduce from comparing them? Finally, is the representation of the Temple in the Sarajevo Haggadah a type or archetype?