Download or read book Envisioning Worlds in Late Antique Art written by Anna Cecilia Olovsdotter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been an accepted assumption that the abstracted mode of visual representation that emerged in late antiquity reflected a collective shift from the outer-directed and ’material’ world-view of classical antiquity to an inner-directed, ’spiritual’ mentality informed by Christianity: the purpose of this volume is to offer a more nuanced and diverse image of the nature and meanings of abstraction and symbolism in late antique and early medieval art, beyond normative intepretation models, and from a number of different methodological and interpretative perspectives. In ten chapters, ten authors specialised in various fields of late-antique and Byzantine art explore the historiographical background of the ’spiritual’ interpretation paradigm, neuroscientific and theological dimensions of Christian visual aesthetics, meanings and motive factors behind apparently wholly abstract and aniconic compositions, symbolic motifs and schemes for visualising cosmic order and the cosmic state of Christ, and the re-use of symbolic Greco-Roman themes in Christian contexts. The result is a multi-focal image of late antique abstraction and symbolism that illuminates the heterogeneity and complexity of the phenomena and of their study.
Download or read book Type and Archetype in Late Antique and Byzantine Art and Architecture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-02-13 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents new approaches to the study of typology in Late Antique and Byzantine art and architecture and highlights the importance of type and archetype in constructing architecture and image theories.
Download or read book Understanding Early Christian Art written by Robin M. Jensen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the content and character of early Christian iconography from the third to the sixth century CE, this substantially revised and updated new edition of Understanding Early Christian Art makes the critical tools of art historians accessible to students. It opens by discussing a series of questions pertaining to the evidence itself and how scholars through the centuries have regarded this material as expressing and transmitting aspects of the developing faith and practice of early adherents of Christianity. It considers possible sources for the various motifs and the complex relationship between words and images, as well as the importance of studying visual and material culture alongside theological and liturgical texts. Rather than organising surviving examples by medium or chronology, the chapters categorise the evidence according to their general iconographic type, such as generic symbols, biblical narratives, and portraits. Each chapter takes up important questions of visual culture, formal style, and the ways in which the iconography is distinct from or shows parallels with contemporary documentary sources like sermons, exegetical works, catechetical lectures, or dogmatic treatises. Concluding with a discussion of the late-emerging depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, it remains a valuable guide to comprehending the complex theology, history, and context of Christian art. Augmented by over 140 full-colour images, accompanied by parallel text, the interdisciplinary and boundary-breaking approach taken in this extensively revised edition of Understanding Early Christian Art enables students and scholars in fields such as religion and art history to further their understanding and knowledge of the art of the early Christian era.
Download or read book Sculpted Thresholds and the Liturgy of Transformation in Medieval Lombardy written by Gillian B. Elliott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-24 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the issue of ecclesiastical authority in Romanesque sculpture on the portals and other sculpted “gateways” of churches in the north Italian region of Lombardy. Gillian B. Elliott examines the liturgical connection between the ciborium over the altar (the most sacred threshold inside the church), and the sculpted portals that appeared on church exteriors in medieval Lombardy. In cities such as Milan, Civate, Como, and Pavia, the liturgy of Saint Ambrose was practiced as an alternative to the Roman liturgy and the churches were constructed to respond to the needs of Ambrosian liturgy. Not only do the Romanesque churches in these places correspond stylistically and iconographically, but they were also linked politically in an era of intense struggle for ultimate regional authority. The book considers liturgical and artistic links between interior church furnishings and exterior church sculptural programs, and also applies new spatial methodologies to the interior and exterior of churches in Lombardy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, architectural history, and religious studies.
Download or read book Classical Philology and Theology written by Catherine Conybeare and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern disciplinary silos tend to separate the fields of classical philology and theology. This collection of essays, however, explores for the first time the deep and significant interactions between them. It demonstrates how from antiquity to the present they have marched hand in hand, informing each other with method, views of the past and structures of argument. The volume rewrites the history of discipline formation, and reveals how close the seminar is to the seminary.
Download or read book The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church written by Andrew Louth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 4474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uniquely authoritative and wide-ranging in its scope, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church is the indispensable reference work on all aspects of the Christian Church. It contains over 6,500 cross-referenced A-Z entries, and offers unrivalled coverage of all aspects of this vast and often complex subject, from theology; churches and denominations; patristic scholarship; and the bible; to the church calendar and its organization; popes; archbishops; other church leaders; saints; and mystics. In this new edition, great efforts have been made to increase and strengthen coverage of non-Anglican denominations (for example non-Western European Christianity), as well as broadening the focus on Christianity and the history of churches in areas beyond Western Europe. In particular, there have been extensive additions with regards to the Christian Church in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Australasia. Significant updates have also been included on topics such as liturgy, Canon Law, recent international developments, non-Anglican missionary activity, and the increasingly important area of moral and pastoral theology, among many others. Since its first appearance in 1957, the ODCC has established itself as an essential resource for ordinands, clergy, and members of religious orders, and an invaluable tool for academics, teachers, and students of church history and theology, as well as for the general reader.
Download or read book Envisioning Experience in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages written by Dr Giselle de Nie and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-28 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our imagination reveals our experience of ourselves and our world. The late philosopher of science and poetry Gaston Bachelard introduced the notion that each image that comes to mind spontaneously is a visual representation of the cognitive and affective pattern that is moving us at the time - often unconsciously. When such a mental image inspires a picture or text, it evokes in the mind of the reader or beholder a replication of the internal pattern that originally inspired the artist or writer. Thus mental images are rarely empty phantasies. Whereas intellectual concepts are conscious constructions of abstracted relations, mental images evoked by texts and pictures often point - like dreams - to pre-verbal experience that patterns itself through multiplying associations and analogies. These mental images can also manifest their own limits, pointing indirectly to experiences beyond what can be expressed and communicated. The six essays in this volume seek to uncover the dynamic patterns in verbal and pictorial images and to evaluate their potentialities and limitations. Thematically ordered according to their specific focus, the essays begin with material images and move on to increasing degrees of immateriality. The subjects treated are: verbal descriptions of an icon and of a statue; imaginative visions and auditions evoked by material depictions; verbal imagery describing imagined sculptures and scenes as compared with drawings of a moving historical pageant; drawings of symbolic figures representing subtle relationships between verbal expositions that cannot be syntactically represented; dream images that precipitate actual healing; and aural patterns in a sounded text that are experienced as 'images' of affective dynamisms.
Download or read book Imagining the Divine written by Jaś Elsner and published by Ashmolean Museum Oxford. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion has always been a fundamental force for constructing identity, from antiquity to the contemporary world. The transformation of ancient cults into faith systems, which we recognise now as major world religions, took place in the first millennium AD, in the period we call 'Late Antiquity'. Our argument is that the creative impetus for both the emergence, and much of the visual distinctiveness of the world religions came in contexts of cultural encounter. Bridging the traditional divide between classical, Asian, Islamic and Western history, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue highlights religious and artistic creativity at points of contact and cultural borders between late antique civilisations. This catalogue features the creation of specific visual languages that belong to four major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. The imagery still used by these belief systems today is evidence for the development of distinct religious identities in Late Antiquity. Emblematic visual forms like the figure of Buddha and Christ, or Islamic aniconism, only evolved in dialogue with a variety of coexisting visualisations of the sacred.0As late antique believers appropriated some competing models and rejected others, they created compelling and long-lived representations of faith, but also revealed their indebtedness to a multitude of contemporaneous religious ideas and images. 00Exhibition: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (19.10.2017-18.02.2018).
Download or read book The Levant Crossroads of Late Antiquity Le Levant Carrefour de l Antiquit tardive written by Ellen Bradshaw Aitken and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Levant: Crossroads of Late Antiquity. History, Religion, and Archaeology / Le Levant: Carrefour de l'Antiquité tardive explores the monumental, religious, and social developments that took place in the Roman province of Syria during the 3rd through 6th centuries CE. Ellen Bradshaw Aitken and John M. Fossey bring together the work of twenty scholars of archaeology, art history, religious studies, and ancient history to examine this dynamic period of change in social, cultural, and religious life. Close attention to texts and material culture, including palaeo-Christian mosaics and churches, highlights the encounters of peoples and religions, as well as the rich exchange of ideas, practices, and traditions in the Levant. The essays bring fresh perspectives on “East” and “West” in antiquity and the diversity of ancient religious movements.
Download or read book Christianizing Egypt written by David Frankfurter and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a culture become Christian, especially one that is heir to such ancient traditions and spectacular monuments as Egypt? This book offers a new model for envisioning the process of Christianization by looking at the construction of Christianity in the various social and creative worlds active in Egyptian culture during late antiquity. As David Frankfurter shows, members of these different social and creative worlds came to create different forms of Christianity according to their specific interests, their traditional idioms, and their sense of what the religion could offer. Reintroducing the term “syncretism” for the inevitable and continuous process by which a religion is acculturated, the book addresses the various formations of Egyptian Christianity that developed in the domestic sphere, the worlds of holy men and saints’ shrines, the work of craftsmen and artisans, the culture of monastic scribes, and the reimagination of the landscape itself, through processions, architecture, and the potent remains of the past. Drawing on sermons and magical texts, saints’ lives and figurines, letters and amulets, and comparisons with Christianization elsewhere in the Roman empire and beyond, Christianizing Egypt reconceives religious change—from the “conversion” of hearts and minds to the selective incorporation and application of strategies for protection, authority, and efficacy, and for imagining the environment.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual written by Risto Uro and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook provides an indispensable account of the ritual world of early Christianity from the beginning of the movement up to the end of the sixth century.
Download or read book The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity written by Lewis Ayres and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 1232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is for scholars and students of the ideas, literatures, and cultures of early Christianity and late antiquity, ancient philosophers, and historians of theology. It offers new perspectives on early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge in relation to changing discourses, institutions, and material culture of late antiquity.
Download or read book Private Worship Public Values and Religious Change in Late Antiquity written by Kimberly Diane Bowes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-28 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional histories of late antique Christianity tell the story of a public institution - the Christian church. In this book, Kim Bowes relates another history, that of the Christian private. Using textual and archaeological evidence, she examines the Christian rituals of home and rural estate, which took place outside the supervision of bishops and their agents. These domestic rituals and the spaces in which they were performed were rooted in age-old religious habits. They formed a major, heretofore unrecognized force in late ancient Christian practice. The religion of home and family, however, was not easily reconciled with that of the bishop's church. Domestic Christian practices presented challenges to episcopal authority and posed thorny questions about the relationship between individuals and the Christian collective. As Bowes suggests, the story of private Christianity reveals a watershed in changing conceptions of "public" and "private," one whose repercussions echo through contemporary political and religious debate.
Download or read book Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-10-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions about space and the sacred are now central to Byzantine studies. Recent scholarship has addressed issues of embodiment and performance, power and identity, environmental perceptions and territorial imaginations. At the same time, the mobility turn in the humanities prompts new approaches to and understandings of processes of circulation of people, objects and ideas. Drawing together illuminating contributions from scholars in history, art history, literature, geography, architecture and theology, Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond sets the stage for further cross-disciplinary dialogue concerning Orthodox Christian spiritual culture and society in the Byzantine Empire and in the centuries after its fall. Contributors are Veronica della Dora, Ekaterine Gedevanishvili, Molly Greene, Mark Guscin, Christos Antonios Kakalis, Chrysovalantis Kyriacou, Maria Litina, Andrew Louth, Mihail Mitrea, Bissera Pentcheva, Rehav Rubin, and David Williams.
Download or read book The World of Kosmas written by Maja Kominko and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New study of the Christian Topography, a sixth-century illustrated treatise, and its intellectual milieu.
Download or read book Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art written by Lee M. Jefferson and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images and artistic representations were of significant value to the early Christian communities. In Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art, Lee Jefferson argues, in fact, that images provided visual representations of vital religious and theological truths crucial to the faithful, by which art possessed the power to project concepts and claims beyond the limitations of the written and spoken word. Images of Christ performing miracles or healings, as demonstrated in this volume, functioned as advertisements for Christianity and illustrated explications of the nature of Christ. These images of Christ as worker of miracles and healing form the nucleus of an extensive examination of this power of art, its role in fostering devotion, and the deep connection between art and its underwriting and elucidation of pivotal theological claims and developments. (back cover).
Download or read book Can We Talk Mediterranean written by Brian A. Catlos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a systematic framework for the emerging field of Mediterranean studies, collecting essays from scholars of history, literature, religion, and art history that seek a more fluid understanding of “Mediterranean.” It emphasizes the interdependence of Mediterranean regions and the rich interaction (both peaceful and bellicose, at sea and on land) between them. It avoids applying the national, cultural and ethnic categories that developed with the post-Enlightenment domination of northwestern Europe over the academy, working instead towards a dynamic and thoroughly interdisciplinary picture of the Mediterranean. Including an extensive bibliography and a conversation between leading scholars in the field, Can We Talk Mediterranean? lays the groundwork for a new critical and conceptual approach to the region.
