Byzantine Art and Architecture

I have to think that one trick of maintaining a profitable press in these days is to slap the word "Byzantine" on something. Books with that in their title always seem to sell well, and there is no shortage in books so titled, which steadily appear in bunches year after year. 

Along comes another international scholarly collection with some very prominent scholars in it whose names will be familiar to readers of this blog if they reward themselves with a copy of The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture, ed. Ellen C. Schwartz (Oxford UP, Dec. 2021), 784pp. 

About this impressive collection the publisher tells us this:

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 Art and Architecture

Set for release later this month--and presumably in time to order for all the Byzantinists, artists, historians, and architects on your Christmas lists--is The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture by Ellen C. Schwartz (OUP, December 2021), 664pp. + 150 illustrations. About this book the publisher tell us the following: 

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.

Performing Byzantium

It is always interesting to watch what verbs and nouns become prevalent in academic discussion, and in my short lifetime, "performing" and cognates has become very common, not least when it comes to Byzantine history. A recently published book by an art historian at the University of California continues this trend: Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy by Roland Betancourt  (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 320pp. 

Betancourt is a recently prolific fellow, as you can see from his other recent book which I noted here; and still others here. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operated within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changed and built as the text proceeded. By examining this process within specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how images, texts, and recitations played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church.

Church of the Holy Apostles

Edited by two major scholars in the field, published in perhaps the most prestigious series for Byzantine scholarship in the anglophone world, and covering one of the most hallowed churches of Byzantium, The Holy Apostles: A Lost Monument, a Forgotten Project, and the Presentness of the Past, eds. Margaret Mullett and Robert G. Ousterhout (Dumbarton Oaks Papers/Harvard University Press, 2020, 320pp.) is a book about a building that no longer exists physically. As the publisher tells us:

Founded by Constantine the Great, rebuilt by Justinian, and redecorated in the ninth, tenth, and twelfth centuries, the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople was the mausoleum of emperors, patriarchs, and saints. It was also a key station in the ceremonies of the city, the site of an important school, a major inspiration for apostolic literature, and briefly the home of the patriarch. Despite its significance, the church no longer exists, replaced by the mosque of Mehmet II after the fall of the city to the Ottomans. Today the church is remembered primarily from two important middle Byzantine ekphraseis, which celebrate its beauty and prominence, as well as from architectural copies and manuscript illustrations.

Scholars have long puzzled over the appearance of the church, as well as its importance to the Byzantines. Anxious to reconstruct the building and its place in the empire, an early collaborative project of Dumbarton Oaks brought together a philologist, an art historian, and an architectural historian in the 1940s and 1950s to reconstruct their own version of the Holy Apostles. Never fully realized, their efforts remained unpublished. The essays in this volume reconsider their project from a variety of vantage points, while illuminating differences of approach seventy years later, to arrive at a twenty-first-century synthesis.

Byzantine Canopies

Study of all things Byzantine remains steady, and that is no less true for the Byzantine liturgical tradition as well, which certainly commands far more scholarly attention in North America today than, say, the Armenian, Alexandrian, or various Syriac traditions.

Released this summer is another study that adds to other works highly focused on very particular parts and details of the Byzantine liturgical tradition: The Framing of Sacred Space: The Canopy and the Byzantine Church by Jelena Bogdanovic (Oxford UP, 2017), 456 Pages + 141 color and 44 black-and-white illustrations.

About this book we are told:

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.