ARCHITECTURE · BYZANTINE ARCHITECTURE
Robert G. Ousterhout
Also known as: Robert Ousterhout, ROBERT OUSTERHOUT
Professor of Art History at U Penn
Most acclaimed
Holy Apostles
"Founded by Constantine the Great, rebuilt by Justinian, and redecorated in the ninth, tenth and twelfth centuries, the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople was the mausoleum of emperors, patriarchs, and saints. It was also a key station in the ceremonies of the city, the site of an important school, a major inspiration for apostolic literature, and briefly the home of the patriarch. Despite its importance, the church no longer exists, replaced by the mosque of Mehmet II after the fall of the city to the Ottomans. Today it is remembered primarily from two important middle Byzantine ekphraseis, which celebrate its beauty and importance, as well as from architectural copies and manuscript illustrations. Scholars have long puzzled over its appearance, as well as its importance to the Byzantines. Anxious to reconstruct the building and its place in the empire, an early collaborative project of Dumbarton Oaks brought together a philologist, an art historian and an architectural historian in the 1940s and 1950s to reconstruct their own version of the Holy Apostles. Never fully realized, their efforts remained unpublished. The essays in this volume reconsider their project from a variety of vantage points, while illuminating differences of approach seventy years later, to arrive at a twenty-first century synthesis"--
Visualizing Community
"Cappadocia, a picturesque volcanic region of central Anatolia, preserves the best evidence of daily life in the Byzantine Empire and yet remains remarkably understudied, better known to tourists than to scholars. The area preserves an abundance of physical remains: at least a thousand rock-cut churches or chapels, of which more than one-third retain significant elements of their painted decoration, as well as monasteries, houses, entire towns and villages, underground refuges, agricultural installations, storage facilities, hydrological interventions, and countless other examples of non-ecclesiastical architecture. In dramatic contrast to its dearth of textual evidence, Cappadocia is unrivaled in the Byzantine world for its material culture. Based upon the close analysis of material and visual residues, Visualizing Community offers a critical reassessment of the story and historiography of Byzantine Cappadocia, with chapters devoted to its architecture and painting, as well as to its secular and spiritual landscapes. In the absence of a written record, it may never be possible to write a traditional history of the region, but, as Robert Ousterhout shows, it is possible to visualize the kinds of communities that once formed the living landscape of Cappadocia."--
Eastern Medieval Architecture
The rich and diverse architectural traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and adjacent regions are the subject of this book, including the social and cultural developments of the Byzantine Empire, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and Russia, as well as parallel developments in Crusader and early Islamic architecture.