Byzantine Mosaics In Greece Hosios Lucas Daphni

Mosaics at Daphni and Hosios Loukas in Boiotia were produced during Byzantium's second golden age, in the period ca. 1090/1100 A.D. This book presents black and white and color images of these works of art, and detailed iconographical and historical commentary.

With the luxury of their materials, technical precision, beauty, and aesthetic grandeur, Byzantine mosaics, particularly the wall mosaics, constitute the most impressive manifestation of Byzantine monumental painting. Highly expensive and laborious works of art, they were commissioned and dedicated by emperors, dignitaries, state officials and members of the Church hierarchy, in order to enhance the dwellings of Divinity, important churches and monasteries; and at the same time to manifest the power, glory and legendary wealth of His earthly representatives. A brilliant selection of mosaics from twenty-five famous monuments are presented here by Nano Chatzidakis, Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Ioannina. In historical and stylistic terms, they cover the development of mosaic art from the 5th to the 14th century, which is described and analysed efficiently by the author in the first part of the volume. The unique pictorial character and special artistic importance of each individual mosaic ensemble presented in this volume is superbly illustrated and emerges strikingly through a full discussion of the stylistic and aesthetic physiognomy of the mosaics it comprises, and a brief reference to the monument it adorns.

Saints and Spectacle examines the origins and reception of the Middle Byzantine program of mosaic decoration. This complex and colorful system of images covers the walls and vaults of churches with figures and compositions seen against a dazzling gold ground. The surviving eleventh-century churches with their wall and vault mosaics largely intact, Hosios Loukas, Nea Moni and Daphni in Greece, pose the challenge of how, when and where this complex and gloriously conceived system was created. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Connor explores the urban culture and context of church-building in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, during the century following the end of Iconoclasm, of around 843 to 950. The application of an innovative frame of reference, through ritual studies, helps recreate the likely scenario in which the medium of mosaics attained its highest potential, in the mosaiced Byzantine church. For mosaics were enlisted to convey a religious and political message that was too nuanced to be expressed in any other way. At a time of revival of learning and the arts, and development of ceremonial practices, the Byzantine emperor and patriarch were united in creating a solution to the problem of consolidating the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire. It was through promoting a vision of the unchallengeable authority residing in God and his earthly representative, the emperor. The beliefs and processional practices affirming the protective role of the saints in which the entire city participated, were critical to the reception of this vision by the populace as well as the court. Mosaics were a luxury medium that was ideally situated aesthetically to convey a message at a particularly important historical moment--a brilliant solution to a problem that was to subtly unite an empire for centuries to come. Supported by a wealth of testimony from literary sources, Saints and Spectacle brings the Middle Byzantine church to life as the witness to a compelling and fascinating drama.

Images and texts tell various stories about the Virgin Mary in Byzantium, reflecting an important cult with strong doctrinal foundations.

A collection of essays that reflect the breadth of twentieth-century scholarship in art history. Kleinbauer has sought to illustrate the variety of methods scholars have developed for conveying the unfolding of the arts in the Western world. Originally published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.

The church of Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, built by the emperor Manuel I Grand Komnenos (1238-63) in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade, is the finest surviving Byzantine imperial monument of its period. Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium is the first investigation of the church in more than thirty years, and is extensively illustrated in colour and black-and-white, with many images that have never previously been published. Antony Eastmond examines the architectural, sculptural and painted decorations of the church, placing them in the context of contemporary developments elsewhere in the Byzantine world, in Seljuq Anatolia and among the Caucasian neighbours of Trebizond. Knowledge of this area has been transformed in the last twenty years, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new evidence that has emerged enables a radically different interpretation of the church to be reached, and raises questions of cultural interchange on the borders of the Christian and Muslim worlds of eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and Persia. This study uses the church and its decoration to examine questions of Byzantine identity and imperial ideology in the thirteenth century. This is central to any understanding of the period, as the fall of Constantinople in 1204 divided the Byzantine empire and forced the successor states in Nicaea, Epiros and Trebizond to redefine their concepts of empire in exile. Art is here exploited as significant historical evidence for the nature of imperial power in a contested empire. It is suggested that imperial identity was determined as much by craftsmen and expectations of imperial power as by the emperor's decree; and that this was a credible alternative Byzantine identity to that developed in the empire of Nicaea.