Review: Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art by Slobodan Curčić and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos; with contributions by Kathleen E. McVey and Helen G. Saradi
| Autor: | Sarah T. Brooks |
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| Rok vydání: | 2012 |
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| Zdroj: | Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 71:237-238 |
| ISSN: | 2150-5926 0037-9808 |
| DOI: | 10.1525/jsah.2012.71.2.237 |
| Popis: | Slobodan Curcic and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos; with contributions by Kathleen E. McVey and Helen G. Saradi. Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art . Princeton and New Haven: Princeton University Art Museum, distributed by Yale University Press, 2010, 376 pp., 185 color and 30 b/w illus. $60 (paper), ISBN 9780300122114 This ambitious catalogue, which accompanied the 2010 show of seventy-six art works at the Princeton University Art Museum, as the flap copy states, seeks to “challenge major assumptions long held by Western art historians and provide new ways of thinking about, looking at, and understanding Byzantine art in its broadest geographic and chronological framework, from A.D. 300 to the early nineteenth century.”1 To this end, the catalogue’s essay authors are successful in critically reassessing the place of architecture in sacred art. Each asks new questions of how audiences perceived the representations of cityscapes, domed churches, and even Roman-era bathhouses in icon painting, manuscript illumination, and sculpture made for public and private devotion. Rather than dismissing the portrayal of architecture in these contexts as “decorative wallpaper” (3), buildings as depicted in sacred art are interrogated for their critical roles in our understanding of architecture’s perception and representation in the eastern Christian tradition. In contrast to the generally negative assessment of architecture in Byzantine art by Renaissance and later Western European historians, the authors of the catalogue read architectural representations in light of Byzantium’s own aesthetic and cultural traditions. The publication provides four concise essays, followed by eighty catalogue entries grouped around the generic, specific, or symbolic representation of architecture, and the architecture of Jerusalem. Throughout the publication, Byzantine art is broadly defined as the art produced during the reign of the Byzantine Empire proper (330–1453) as well as works created from the mid-fifteenth-century conquest of the political state until the modern period. This body of material can more broadly be … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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