Byzantine News

Audio lecture by Sharon Gerstel: Witnessing Byzantium: The Greek Perspective

The Throne of Maximian (or Maximianus) is a throne that was made for Archbishop Maximianus of Ravenna and is now on display at the Archiepiscopal Museum, Ravenna. It is generally agreed that the throne was carved in the Greek East of the Byzantine Empire and shipped to Ravenna, but there has long been scholarly debate over whether it was made in Constantinople or Alexandria. Maximianus, Portrait, Ravenna The style of the throne is a mixture of Early Christian art and that of the First Golden Age of Byzantine art. It is made of carved ivory panels, with frames of winding vines and grapevines, on a wooden frame. The throne itself is large with a high semi-circular back and may have held a jewelled cross or Gospel book for some of the time. The ivory carvings are done in relief and the panels depict important biblical figures. The back of the throne shows scenes of the Life of Christ, the sides include scenes of the Story of Joseph from the Book of Genesis, and on the front of ...

From NY Times: All images of public-domain artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection — about 375,000 — are now free for anyone to use however they may please.The museum announced on Tuesday that it had changed its open access policy to allow free, unrestricted use of any images of artworks in the public domain, using the license designation Creative Commons Zero, known as CC0. Click here to access the collection

An article from the Greek newspaper Kathimerini:  The Syrian Mosaic Pavement Documentation project, which was signed in 2005, foresaw the full documentation of the country’s floor mosaics and annual education programs for Syrian postgraduate students to help them keep abreast of technological developments. Click here to read more. And don't forget to sign up for our newsletter. 

A great resource, the online interface of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has published several images and historical introductions of Byzantine objects. Here is an example of a page from an Illuminated Gospel, late 14th centuryEthiopia, Highland region: This illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels was created at a monastic center in northern Ethiopia. Twenty full-page paintings depict scenes from the life of Christ and four portraits of the evangelists introduce the respective Gospel texts. The New Testament was translated from Greek into Geez, the classical language of Ethiopia, in the sixth century. Both this text and its pictorial format draw upon Byzantine prototypes, which were transformed into a local idiom of expression. Stylistically consistent, the paintings reflect the hands of two distinct artists. The color scheme consists of red, yellow, green, and blue. A stylized uniformity is reflected in the abbreviated definition of facial features and the bold lin...

The Svetlana Tomeković Database of Byzantine Art is available online. Click here for more

A succinct but highly informative introduction into the study of middle Byzantine Church architecture by R. Ousterhout. The architecture of the middle Byzantine period reflects changes in the nature of Byzantine society starting with the Transitional Period from the 7th to 9th centuries (plague, famine, Arab invasions, Iconoclast controversy, deurbanization, a cultural break). These societal changes led from an open to a closed society, from a public to a private character of Byzantine life. Developments in the architecture profession are reflected in the terminology of the period—a change from theory-based to practice-based. Modifications in worship practices dictated a smaller-scale to the buildings to serve private devotion. The symbolic importance of the dome continued, as with the two-axis, two-focus space expressed in the Hagia Sophia, but with a dramatic reduction in scale. Click here to read more

A new documentary from the Getty Museum presenting five major Byzantine churches.

Full access to a major resource for the study of Byzantine art: The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, edited by Helen C. Evans, William D. Wixom :

A new book on Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience by Nadine Schibille. From the introduction: Paramount in the shaping of early Byzantine identity was the construction of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (532-537 CE). This book examines the edifice from the perspective of aesthetics to define the concept of beauty and the meaning of art in early Byzantium. Byzantine aesthetic thought is re-evaluated against late antique Neoplatonism and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius that offer fundamental paradigms for the late antique attitude towards art and beauty. Click here to browse the book.

In December, Dumbarton Oaks Research Center for Byzantine Studies will host a new colloquium on Byzantine emotions and passions. Byzantinists were early into the field of the study of emotion with Henry Maguire’s ground-breaking article on sorrow, published in 1977. But since then classicists and western medievalists have developed new ways of understanding how emotional communities work and where the ancients’ concepts of emotion differ from our own. It is time perhaps to celebrate Maguire’s work, but also to look at what is distinctive about Byzantine emotion. We should like to encourage speakers to focus on a single emotion and to use it as a vantage point to investigate central aspects of the Byzantine worldview. We want to look at emotions as both cognitive and relational processes. Our focus is not only the construction of emotions with respect to perception and cognition; we are also interested in how emotions were communicated and exchanged across broad (multi)linguistic, p...

As a large scale social and religious phenomenon in Byzantium, pilgrimages produced a good number of texts and other source materials. A recent brief article from Bible History Daily discusses the Byzantine pilgrimage. Jerusalem has been revered as a holy city for millennia—with pilgrims a staple feature in its bustling streets. Egeria’s Travels and the journals of the Bordeaux Pilgrim and the Piacenza Pilgrim demonstrate that this was as true in the Byzantine period as it is today. Click here to read it.

An interesting and detailed article about a topic good for those who enjoy spending time in a garden: Byzantine Monastic Horticulture:The Textual Evidence, by A.-M. Talbot From the introduction: There is a paucity of evidence on Byzantine gardens, both textual and archaeological. Whenwe turn to monastic horticulture, however, the situation is somewhat less bleak, for bothfoundation documents (typika) and saints’ lives shed occasional light on the gardens, vineyards,and orchards that provided food, drink, and eucharistic wine for the use of the residentmonks or nuns. The surviving textual sources should ideally be supplemented by thefindings of archaeological excavation of actual monastic gardens. Such excavation, whichhas been carried out to date primarily in the late Roman monasteries of Palestine, can onlybe touched upon in this essay, in which I focus on the literary evidence. For the most part Ilimit my observations to those gardens situated in the immediate vicinity of mon...

Studies on the reception of the classical tradition have recently become an indispensable part of classical studies. Understanding the importance of ancient civilization means also studying how it was used subsequently. Students of the classical tradition research the influence of ancient literature, its use in political discourse, and its manifestations in films, TV series, graphic novels and computer games. A recent flood of publications, including companions, handbooks and dictionaries, now addresses these issues. The Eastern Roman Empire, however, has not been so lucky. The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars interested in the reception of Byzantine culture in literature, political discourse, pop-culture (games, graphic novels, etc.). We would like to see how Byzantium was used and abused, how Byzantine motifs were transformed and adapted throughout centuries. Amongst the invited speakers are scholars from around the world. The organisation of the conference i...

// // A video about San Vitale

Ancient mosaic floor belonged to Byzantine-era church has been discovered by some looters near the Roman city of Jerash in Jordan. The remains were unearthed on private property located outside the ancient city of Jerash, around 40km north of Amman, said director of the French Archaeological Mission at Jerash Jacques Seigne. Looters uncovered the mosaics accidentally when they were digging during the night, according to a report announced by the Department of Antiquities in Jerash. The discovered floor, which is around five by seven meters in full colour, features an unusual scene of men climbing up trees to hide from bears and lions.   --> An inscription was also found at the site that displays names of the patron and mosaic artist of the floor. According to the inscription, the experts believe that the findings date back to 589-590 CE. The Department of Antiquities (DoA), presiding by Rafe Harahshah, managed a 45-day rescue operation to uncover and secure the...

The art of creating mosaic patterns grew and developed with the rise of the Byzantine Empire in the 5th century. New characteristics appeared in mosaics with Eastern influences in style and the use of glass tesserae, known as smalti, sourced from northern Italy. This added new texture and life to the mosaic patterns being created, with the smalti, which were cut from thick sheets of colored glass and had a rough surface and tiny air bubbles throughout, being backed by reflective silver or gold leaf. --> The application of mosaics also changed; while the Romans favored the use of mosaic patterns for flooring, the Byzantines took the art further and applied them to walls and ceilings. They kept their smalti un-grouted to allow light to reflect and refract through them and set their pieces at slight angles to capture the play of light as it moved through the space and allow the silver or gold backing to sparkle from every angle. The mosaic patterns and themes melded togethe...

'Greek Literary Epigram: From the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Era' An international conference to be held at University College London, 11 - 13 September 2013. Recent scholarship has witnessed an escalating interest in the study of Greek literary epigram, which was given further momentum by the discovery and publication of the New Milan Papyrus, attributed to Posidippus of Pella. Considerable progress has been made in our appreciation of the development and features of the genre and its exponents in the Hellenistic period. However, intense scholarly focus on Hellenistic epigram has led to an under-appreciation of the later epigrammatic material, from the Roman to the Byzantine period. The aim of this international conference is to investigate the changes that literary epigram underwent over the centuries, its interrelationship with other Greek literary genres and with the visual arts, as well as the factors which influenced its development across time. In this...

A Byzantine art masterpiece: the David Plates This beautiful and exceptionally important set of nine silver plates, dated 629 to 630, was discovered with two other silver plates in 1902 in Karavas in northern Cyprus (see Map 2). The plates were found hidden near a small horde of gold jewelry. Most of this treasure came to the Metropolitan Museum from the collection of J. Pierpont Morgan. Six of the David Plates are in the Metropolitan’s collection and are on view in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art on the first floor (in the long corridor gallery on the right of the Grand Staircase, as approached from the Great Hall). The other three plates are in the collection of the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, Cyprus. In eleven scenes, David is summoned from his flock of sheep to meet the prophet Samuel; he is anointed the new king of Israel by Samuel (since King Saul of Israel is no longer in God’s favor); David argues with his brother Eliab after he comes into Saul’s camp...

An article by Ioli Kalavrezou: Ioli Kalavrezou-Maxeiner, Byzantine Icons in Steatite, I-II, Revue des etudes byzantines, 1986.  Click here to read it online.