1 - 4 of 4 results for: ARTHIST408

This seminar uncovers the aesthetic principles and spiritual operations at work in Hagia Sophia, the church dedicated to Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. Rather than a static and inert structure, the Great Church emerges as a material body that comes to life when the morning or evening light resurrects the glitter of its gold mosaics and when the singing of human voices activates the reverberant and enveloping sound of its vast interior. Drawing on art and architectural history, liturgy, musicology, and acoustics, this course explores the Byzantine paradigm of animation arguing that it is manifested in the visual and sonic mirroring, in the chiastic structure of the psalmody, and in the prosody of the sung poetry. Together these elements orchestrate a multi-sensory experience that has the potential to destabilize the divide between real and oneiric, placing the faithful in a space in between terrestrial and celestial. A short film on aesthetics and samples of Byzantine chant digitally imprinted with the acoustics of Hagia Sophia are developed as integral segments of this research; they offer a chance for the student to transcend the limits of textual analysis and experience the temporal dimension of this process of animation of the inert.

As modern viewers we enter with confidence and detachment the interiors of medieval churches. We are rarely aware of their psychological impact, placing the viewer under the watchful eye of the divine Judge depicted in the apex of the dome. By contrast, medieval viewers responded to this gaze with fear, guilt, and an urgency to repent for their sinful selves. How is this experience of abjection created? We seek answers by analyzing the spatial structuring of the visual programs and by engaging with the role the liturgy (poetry and song) plays in producing medieval subjectivity. The geographical scope includes churches in the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. The medieval material is put in conversation with modern approaches to the concepts of subjectivity, surveillance, and control (Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Marion, and Adriana Cavarero).

The seminar reveals the religious and ethnic hybridity of the art medieval Spain, where the lives, material cultures, and artistic practices of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were more intertwined than any other region of the medieval world. We work thematically rather than strictly chronologically in order to build a model of engagement with medieval art in which the movement of ideas and objects between the three major religions is in itself a focus of study.