Robert G. Ousterhout

Excavations (archaeology); Middle East; 19th century.

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.

"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 Never fully realized, their efforts remained unpublished.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"--

"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."--

A new generation of American medieval art historians explores how sacred images were perceived during the Middle Ages in Byzantium and Europe. Focusing on the relationship between a particular type of medieval art - the sacred image - and its audience, the contributors consider the part played in this relationship by the image's context, whether on the page of a book or on the wall of a building. The book allows the reader to see the fluidity of the sacred image, showing how factors including audience, purpose, and setting affected the form it took. The essays cover a full range of images, including panel paintings, altarpieces, manuscripts, and wall paintings, and a rich variety of socioreligious settings, private, monastic, and imperial. Also examined are the differences between images produced for a single viewer and those produced for communities; images produced for private contemplation or devotion and those that functioned within a liturgical setting; and the varying ways in which sacred images affected women and men, religious and secular communities, rulers and the ruled.

"In the first major study to examine Byzantine architecture from the perspective of its builders, Robert Ousterhout identifies the problems Byzantine masons commonly encountered in the process of design and construction. From a careful analysis of the written evidence, the archaeological record, and - most importantly - the surviving buildings, he concludes that Byzantine architecture was far more innovative than has previously been acknowledged.". "Following preliminary observations on Byzantine church architecture and its defining characteristics, Ousterhout examines the textual sources, yielding a new understanding of the identities and the respective roles of patrons, bureaucrats, and masons in the building process. Narrowing his focus to the masons, or master builders, he clarifies both their theoretical and their very practical concerns in architectural design, suggesting that the master builders relied on geometry and memory, rather than blueprints, to guide their work. The study focuses on churches built in the area of Constantinople between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, but it also refers back to earlier works such as Hagia Sophia, and it tracks Byzantine masons as far afield as Russia, the Balkans, and Jerusalem. With more than two hundred carefully chosen illustrations - many published here for the first time - this is a must read for anyone interested in Byzantine architecture and monumental art."--BOOK JACKET.

"In this book, a distinguished team of authors investigates the role of architecture in the construction of sacred experience in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine cultures"-- "In this book, a distinguished team of authors explores the way space, place, architecture, and ritual interact to construct sacred experience in the historical cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Essays address fundamental issues and features that enable buildings to perform as spiritually transformative spaces in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine civilizations. Collectively they demonstrate the multiple ways in which works of architecture and their settings were active agents in the ritual process. Architecture did not merely host events; rather, it magnified and elevated them, interacting with rituals facilitating the construction of ceremony. This book examines comparatively the ways in which ideas and situations generated by the interaction of place, built environment, ritual action, and memory contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred experience in different religious faiths"--