080078 PS Case Study: Heaven and Earth: The Senses in Byzantine Art (2017S)

Art history has long privileged sight as the primary mode of perceiving works of art. However, a great variety of architectural settings and many works which we now term “art” were conceived in very different – often religious – contexts that intentionally played upon multiple senses in order to stimulate specific reactions in not observers but participants. This was no different in Byzantium or even in the Orthodox churches of today.
This course will provide a general introduction into Byzantine artistic and religious culture as revealed to us through textual sources and material evidence related to the sensory experience of the Byzantine church. By recontextualizing individual elements and examining sacred architecture as an “installation” (James 2004), we hope to move beyond the purely visual investigation of medieval artworks and to delve into questions of function and interaction, perception and emotion.
The senses – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch – are how we experience the world around us, and to the medieval mind they also represented both pathways for communion with the divine and seductive pitfalls of earthly existence. We will also investigate this paradox: how the human body can stand at the center of religious experience and yet its senses can be used to transcend the physical body and achieve knowledge of the divine.
Methods: Students will be asked to analyze critically secondary literature and excerpts from primary textual sources in translation. Methods relevant to the investigation of individual topics include formal analysis, iconography, stylistic and technical analysis, and condition, as well as methodological approaches stemming from anthropology, psychology, theology, cultural and social history and gender studies.
Goals: As a Fallstudie II/III the main goal is to train academic investigation in the field of art history and to provide students with practice in presenting the results of their research coherently in both verbal and written forms.