Art and Death in Medieval Byzantium
Dramatic illustrations of saintly deaths, as well as elaborate tombs featuring portraits of the deceased, were among the most powerful and persistent images in medieval Byzantium from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Such artistic monuments expressed both individual and communal ideas about death, and life after death. Byzantine Christians believed in the soul’s gradual [...]
Iconoclasm
Iconoclasm a religious movement of the 8th and 9th C. that denied the holiness of Icons and rejected icon veneration. Clerical opposition to the artistic depiction of sacred personages had its roots in late antiquity. In the 4th C. Eusebios of Caesarea, evidently drawing on the christology of Origen, denied the possibility of artistically delineating [...]
Chora Monastery- Short introduction
Chora Monastery (Turk. Kariye Camii), located in the northwestern region of Constantinople near Edirne Kapi. The early history of Chora (Ξώρα, lit. “dwelling place”) is obscure. A legendary tradition attributes the foundation to the 6th-C. saint Theodore (BHG 1743), supposed uncle of Justinian I’s wife Theodora; a more reliable source identifies the founder as Krispos, [...]
Recent Comments