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This thesis discusses the role and place of artists who painted icons in Early Byzantium. To date, they have not been the focus of much academic attention. Instead, information about artists is spread across a range of discussions concerning Byzantium and the history of art. This thesis collates and interprets the empirical and theoretical evidence to concentrate on the people who produced religious portraits before Iconoclasm. In so doing, I seek to further our understanding of these individuals, and offer a more nuanced view of their socio-cultural context, their practices, and the images they painted. This thesis is structured around two definitions of what the Early Byzantine artist could be: ideal and real. I start with the legend that St Luke painted portraits of Christ and the Virgin from life. Part One, ‘The Ideal Artist', considers in turn: the legend of St Luke as an artist and its origins; Luke as an ideal artist; and two other ideal artists: God and the emperor. Part Two, ‘The Real Artist', considers in turn: icons; literary and legislative texts; and finally the motivation for producing religious imagery before the eighth century. The anonymity of artists working in the Early Byzantine period seems to have delayed scholarly interest in them. In this thesis, however, I consider their anonymity as crucial evidence for who artists were: believers. Christian faith in Byzantium is a recurrent theme in this thesis. I argue that artists practiced humility by not signing their work and painted icons to demonstrate, develop, and deepen their love for God. Further, I argue that artists who depicted Mary and Jesus as Mother and Child, as Luke had done, imitated the Evangelist and participated in his image.

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This thesis aims to contribute towards a better understanding of what the Byzantines experienced in church spaces. By thoroughly mapping users' encounters with the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in the sixth-century, it examines whether the experience of the architectural space during the Eucharistic ritual augmented a religious experience, which in turn, influenced the way the Byzantines talked about their spiritual experience whilst being in a church, and thought of their churches as ‘heaven on earth.' It places textual evidence alongside architectural evidence. The basic approach of this thesis is rooted in phenomenology and multisensory perception of space. In the first chapter, I make a case for the necessity of studying the textual evidence in light of the spatial experience of the building. I suggest that the concept of ‘archi-text' is key to answering the question of what was a church in sixth-century Byzantium. Developed in three chapters, the textual analysis focuses on sixth-century ekphraseis of Hagia Sophia written by Procopius of Caesarea and Paul the Silentiary, and the inauguration kontakion composed for the church dedication. In the first two chapters, I examine how the spatial perception of the church influenced the way Hagia Sophia was described. In the next chapter, I explore how the Byzantines thought of the church in symbolic and theological terms. The literary analysis concludes that Hagia Sophia was perceived as a centralised space and represented as a ‘heaven on earth.' These two points are further scrutinized all through the spatial analysis of the church. The final chapter links the Byzantines' symbolic representation of the church to the architectural physicality of Hagia Sophia.

This thesis argues that some Early Byzantine floor mosaics had, in addition to a practical and decorative role, a supernatural function. By this I mean the images and words depicted within the mosaic were perceived as devices to attract powers from a supernatural dimension, for the benefit of those that walked over the mosaic or the building that housed it. The thesis is ultimately a discussion of the Byzantines' beliefs in the power of art and text, and how they were believed to intervene and affect everyday life. My examination is carried out with a focus on the floor mosaics produced between the fourth and seventh centuries in the Byzantine Empire. Using an iconographic methodological approach, the thesis explores how certain images and words incorporated within mosaic designs can be seen in supernatural terms. To do so, comparable material objects with clearer supernatural functions will be examined. Primary sources that indicate how certain motifs were perceived to bring about powers will also be analysed. In this thesis, I analyse the different kinds of devices that were depicted to attract supernatural powers and explore why those devices were believed to have the ability to generate powers. The thesis illustrates how power could be seen as being rooted in Christianity, magic or more unclear sources. Expanding on this discussion, I explore how a single mosaic could incorporate elements from several sources, dispelling scholarship that portrays the Early Byzantine period as predominately influenced by Christianity. The other key function of the thesis is to emphasise the fact that mosaics can be considered in terms of the conscious design process of their construction, placing them within the same category as gemstones and icons in terms of purposeful objects.

The Second Council of Nicaea, in 787 AD, marked the end of iconoclasm, while in 843 the Treaty of Verdun laid the foundations of Europe. With these agreements, a sustained period of imageless iconolatry was initiated. However, the veneration of icons was based on the absolute worship of matter and form, which replaced the prime spiritual concept of ‘image and likeness’. Millennia of research and thought resulted in imageless representations of natural phenomena. Pushing aside the topology of the image and its sign, the intelligent man, from the Age of Reason and onward, considered himself as an auto-authorised and teleological-free entity. To this end, he maximised the intelligibility of his space by designing an all-inclusive Cartesian cocoon in which to secure his mass and form. Yet, there he found his pet (Schrodinger’s Cat) to be both dead and alive, and the apple, still forbidden, had become a bouncing ball, serving as evidence of gravity. Hence, this intelligent design, by default, carries the residual fear of Manichaean and Augustinian devils, and is deemed to have converted to a de-sign crisis. Relying on literature sources, this dissertation examines two dominant models that govern human cognition and the production of knowledge. Despite remarkable scientific achievements which resulted, the aftermath of human progress was, among others, the maximisation of residual fear, to such an extent that voracious black holes devour all matter. Inaugurating the transhumanist period, the human becomes a Manchurian Candidate, still an upgraded ape and a victim of his own nature in the Anthropocene. In an attempt to overcome this de-sign crisis, the research presented in this thesis aims to address the necessity of the restoration of icons, as evidenced by Byzantine art and philosophy but neglected in the name of human supremacy and imperialism. This thesis elucidates Classical and Late Antiquity manuscripts in an effort to set a new ‘restore point’, endeavouring to launch the image in the current organosilicon substances; examples from Scripture narratives as well as from visual arts contribute to this effort. The proposed concluding scheme is the Module of Theōria, which reflects the major transhumanistic elements such as transmutation, interaction and fluidity. Theōria functions through noetic mechanisms, using ‘image and likeness’ as the prime carriers of knowledge. The anticipated outcome is to reveal a human investment in a pro-nature incorruptibility with the advent of Theōria in the field of Τechnoetics, where one can administer ‘image and likeness’ to gain capital liquidity.

The Novgorod icon of Divine Wisdom is a great innovation of fifteenth-century Russian art. It represents the winged female Sophia flanked by the Theotokos and John the Baptist. Although the icon has a contemporaneous commentary and it exercised a profound influence on Russian cultural history (inspiring, among others, the sophiological theory of the turn of the twentieth century), its meaning, together with the dating and localisation of the first appearance of the iconography, has remained a great art-historical conundrum. This thesis sheds new light on this icon and explores the message, roots, function and historical context of the first, most emblematic and most enigmatic Russian allegorical iconography. In contrast to its recent interpretations as a Trinitarian image with Christ-Angel, it argues that the winged Sophia is the personification of the Orthodox Church. The Novgorod Wisdom icon represents the Church of Hagia Sophia, that is Orthodoxy, as it was perceived in fifteenth-century Rus’: the icon together with its commentary was a visual-textual response to the Florentine Union between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, signed in 1439 but rejected by the Russians in 1441. The thesis is based on detailed interdisciplinary research, utilising simultaneously the methodologies of philology, art history, theology and history. The combined analysis reveals that the great innovation of the Novgorod Sophia icon is that it amalgamates ecclesiological and sophiological iconographies in new ways. Hence the dissertation is also an innovative attempt to survey how Orthodoxy was perceived and visualized in medieval Rus’. It identifies the theological questions that constituted the basis of Russian Orthodox identity in the Middle Ages and reveals the significance of the polemics between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches for the history of Medieval Russian art.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Art History, June 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Materiality and considerations of color in medieval art have been the subject of a growing number of studies in recent years, but have tended to address architecture, monumental works of art such as mosaics, or metalworking. Scholars working on western medieval manuscripts have shown how much can be done with technical art history in this arena, but to date, the study of manuscript materials and their meanings with respect to the Byzantine world have been lacking. This dissertation resituates the understanding of Middle Byzantine (East Medieval Roman) manuscript production from the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE, employing a cross-disciplinary approach that synthesizes traditional codicological analysis with new technologies that identify precise materials and techniques. In particular, this work explores Middle Byzantine manuscript materiality along two perspectives. First, it investigates modes of manufacture, identifying materials and techniques of Middle Byzantine manuscripts themselves, especially in the Lectionary of Katherine Komnena and the Dumbarton Oaks Lectionary. Secondly, it analyzes the meanings and understandings of those materials along liturgical, monastic, and scientific-intellectual contexts in the manuscripts’ specific use in Middle Byzantine milieus. In each case, the focus is Middle Byzantine, Greek-language Gospel Lectionaries traceable to the Rite of Constantinople. These lavishly illuminated books played important roles in Christian liturgical contexts, and provide an opportunity to explore what Byzantines thought about the natural world.This study revises both the methodological approaches of earlier manuscript scholars and interpretations that assign place of production and meaning of materials as solely iconographic or stylistic problems. Byzantine manuscripts — in part due to twentieth-century historiographic traditions — have rarely been considered in terms of their material production, in contrast to their counterparts in western Medieval Europe, which have been explored with modern technology in exciting new ways in recent decades. As a result, this void in Byzantine studies provides a great opportunity for considering the specific contexts of these objects in their production and significance. As this dissertation attends to the material contexts of Byzantine Gospel Lectionaries, it analyzes the manuscripts in terms of their materials and methods of production, and consider the relationships between materials, Byzantine understandings of matter through the field of alchemy, and the production of knowledge about artmaking in Byzantium. This strategy seeks to account for both the interest in Byzantine intellectual works on the nature of matter and the manner in which knowledge about codex creation was passed on. Although this dissertation follows art historical methodologies and not those of the hard sciences, it incorporates scientific data that identifies precise pigments on manuscript pages into my study. In this work, the materials used by the manuscript makers of the studied objects are identified. This involves performing non-destructive analysis, collaborating with conservators, through close observation and the use of x-ray reflectography, which allows for the non-invasive, in situ study of manuscript materials. / Art History

This thesis sets out to probe the complex artistic contacts between Italy and Cyprus in the visual arts during the High and Late Middle Ages. The Introduction provides a critical review of the subject. Chapter I maps out the various types of links (with respect to trade, religion, warfare, art, culture) between Italy and Cyprus in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Chapters II and III examine the multifaceted artistic negotiations between southern Italy (mainly Apulia) and Cyprus in the thirteenth century, by closely examining a cluster of frescoes and panel paintings. Through a set of historical, cultural and artistic (stylistic and iconographic) approaches, these chapters aim to supersede the somewhat limited style-oriented analyses of previous contributions to this area of study. The hitherto unverified and convoluted relations between the two regions are revisited and affirmed within a new conceptual framework. Chapters IV and V investigate fourteenth-century cross-currents as seen in two cases that have formerly occupied a marginal position in discussions of intercultural exchanges between Italy and Cyprus. The first is the transplantation and manifestation of the cult of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Cyprus, and the second, the hybrid series of icons created by Italian painters working on the island. Both cases are appraised as a record of historical realities and not as the by-products of casual encounters. The thesis historicises these contacts and in doing so, contributes to a broader understanding of cultural transmission and convergence in the Medieval Mediterranean.