
Visualizing Christ's Miracles in Late Byzantium
Art, Theology, and Court Culture
Maria Alessia Rossi(Author)
Cambridge University Press
Published on 27. June 2024
Book
Hardback
366 pages
978-1-009-38762-0 (ISBN)
Description
This book investigates the political and spiritual agenda behind monumental paintings of Christ's miracles in late Byzantine churches in Constantinople, Mystras, Thessaloniki, Mount Athos, Ohrid, and Kastoria. It is the first exhaustive examination of Christ's miracles in monumental decoration, offering a comparative and detailed analysis of their selection, grouping, and layout and redefining the significance of this diverse and unique iconography in the early Palaiologan period. Maria Alessia Rossi argues that these painted cycles were carefully and inventively crafted by the cultural milieu, secular and religious, surrounding Emperor Andronikos II (r. 1282-1328) at a time of ferment in the early Palaiologan era. Furthermore, by adopting an interdisciplinary approach, she demonstrates that the novel flowering of Christ's miracles in art was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather emerged as part of a larger surge in literary commissions, and reveals how miracles became a tool to rewrite history and promote Orthodoxy.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises; 4 Maps; 95 Halftones, color
Dimensions
Height: 245 mm
Width: 179 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
1007 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-38762-0 (9781009387620)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
MARIA ALESSIA ROSSI is an Art History Specialist at the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. She has co-edited Late Byzantium Reconsidered: The Arts of the Palaiologan Era in the Mediterranean (2019), Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages (2020), and Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres (2021). She is the cofounder of the initiative North of Byzantium and the digital platform Mapping Eastern Europe.
Content
Acknowledgments; List of figures; List of maps; List of drawings; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Ecclesiastical policies and the sociohistorical context of the early palaiologan period; 2. A wealth of sources: miracles in text and image; 3. Christ's miracles: selection and iconography; 4. Christ's miracles: grouping and setting; 5. Christ's miracle cycle in Byzantine churches; Conclusion; Tables A-E; Bibliography; Index.