In this session, we wish to consider style in late antique and Byzantine art. When the art of late antiquity and the Eastern Roman Empire first became a topic of study in the late-19th and early-20th centuries in the work of such scholars as Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov (1844-1925) and Alois Riegl (1858-1905), discussion was built on a scaffolding of aesthetic value, with questions of style structuring the focus and direction of inquiry. These approaches became standard, and as the work of scholars such as André Grabar (1896-1990), Ernst Kitzinger (1912-2003), and Kurt Weitzmann (1904-1993) demonstrate, discussions of formal value dominated art historical inquiry well into the 20th century. Ideas about quality informed evaluations of style: Illusionistic, “Greek” form, associated with such urban centers as Alexandria and Constantinople, represented the ideal, while stylized renderings, often understood as provincial or Oriental, were open to criticism. More recently the topic of style has fallen from favor, and scholars have given priority to other questions: e.g. iconography, meaning, intersectionality, and globalization. Yet the question of style remains unsettled. No agreement exists on how to understand style historically, or its role in the Byzantine aesthetic imagination. Guided by the conviction that visual form represents an essential and deliberate means of communication, we wish to refocus on the issue of style in and outside of the later and Eastern Roman Empire. Papers will examine such questions as the historiography of style, stylistic variation and meaning, style and ethnicity. The historically-grounded understanding of style is integral to the larger questions that are now being asked of Byzantine art.
Although Art History has moved away from stylistic analysis as its central method, style remains the dominant tool for attributing works of art that lack archaeological or historical context. In such cases, style often provides the only grounds for contextualization. Portable luxury objects, once relegated to the category of ‘decorative’ or ‘minor’ arts, form a…
Questions of style and of quality in mosaics have been implicitly linked and little explored. ‘Byzantine,’ as a style label when it comes to mosaics, often denotes quality; lesser mosaics are less ‘Byzantine’ and less good (the Mother of God in the apse of Hagia Sophia in Kyiv the work of a ‘third-rate’ artist, for…
The painted Romanesque apse of Santa Maria d’Àneu (Catalonia, Spain) dating from the late 11th century has often been seen as a unique pictorial ensemble. In both style and iconography, the paintings present striking features which reminds us of some Byzantine theophanies in the eastern Mediterranean (Coptic Egypt, Cyprus, Cappadocia, Constantinople) and Ravenna. The imposing…
There is no better place to consider the question of style in late antique art than Vienna. It was here that the modern discipline of art history took shape in a series of studies devoted to the art of the later Roman period, specifically Franz Wickhoff’s Wiener Genesis (1895) and Alois Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunst-Industrie (1901)….