Download PDF | Mark J. Johnson_ Robert Ousterhout_ Amy Papalexandrou (eds.) - Approaches to Byzantine Architecture and its Decoration_ Studies in Honor of Slobodan Ćurčić-Routledge (2016).
334 Pages
APPROACHES TO BYZANTINE ARCHITECTURE AND Irs DECORATION
The fourteen essays in this collection demonstrate a wide variety of approaches to the study of Byzantine architecture and its decoration, a reflection of both newer trends and traditional scholarship in the field. The variety is also a reflection of Professor Curtié’s wide interests, which he shares with his students. These include the analysis of recent archaeological discoveries; recovery of lost monuments through archival research and onsite examination of material remains; reconsidering traditional typological approaches often ignored in current scholarship; fresh interpretations of architectural features and designs; contextualization of monuments within the landscape; tracing historiographic trends; and mining neglected written sources for motives of patronage.
The papers also range broadly in terms of chronology and geography, from the Early Christian through the post-Byzantine period and from Italy to Armenia. Three papers examine Early Christian monuments, and of these two expand the inquiry into their architectural afterlives. Others discuss later monuments in Byzantine territory and monuments in territories related to Byzantium such as Serbia, Armenia, and Norman Italy. No Orthodox church being complete without interior decoration, two papers discuss issues connected with frescoes in late medieval Balkan churches. Finally, one study investigates the continued influence of Byzantine palace architecture long after the fall of Constantinople.
Mark J. Johnson is Professor of Medieval Art and Architectural History at Brigham Young University, USA.
Robert Ousterhout is Professor and Graduate Chair in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Amy Papalexandrou is an Independent Scholar and Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.
A Tribute to Slobodan Curéié, Scholar and Friend
Svetlana Popovic
I first met Slobodan Curéi¢é in September 1985 in Belgrade. While I was already familiar with his scholarly work, I had not yet had the opportunity to meet him personally. Then the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences organized an international symposium, “Deéani and Byzantine Art in the Fourteenth Century,” with Slobodan Curéié as one of the keynote speakers. Ona pleasant September morning, as we participants chatted before boarding the buses in Belgrade’s Republic Square to travel to the monastery of Deéani in Kosovo, one of my colleagues introduced me to Professor Curéi¢é. With a friendly smile he mentioned that he had read some of my papers, but had not had an opportunity to meet me earlier. I was glad to be introduced to him, never thinking that this would mark the beginning of a fruitful scholarly collaboration and sincere friendship.
Now, after nearly three decades, on the occasion of celebrating Professor Curéié’s successful career, his students have asked me to write about their professor and my dear friend. I am happy to accept this invitation.
Slobodan Curtié was educated in two different environments, both of which had a great impact on his later professional accomplishments. More precisely, he was educated in two different countries—the former Yugoslavia and the United States of America. He was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (formerly Yugoslavia), during the turbulent beginnings of World War IL, on 19 December 1940. In wartime, under pressures and threats, his Serbian parents and their newborn son left Sarajevo for the security of Belgrade, which became Slobodan’s native town. He received his elementary and high school education in Belgrade, in a family of academics, his father becoming a distinguished professor in the school of Technical Sciences at the University of Belgrade. Slobodan Curéié continued his studies in the United States, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he could be near the family of his maternal aunt and uncle in Chicago.
There he received the degrees of Bachelor (1964) and Master (1965) of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He continued his graduate studies with the celebrated professor Richard Krautheimer at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and earned his Ph.D. in Art History (1975). Today, Slobodan Curéic is an internationally recognized scholar in Byzantine studies, specializing in Byzantine architecture and art. He has dedicated his entire career to research and teaching, beginning in the Department of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he taught for 11 years (1971-1982), and in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University (1982-2010).
Slobodan Curéié has long since been recognized as a serious student of Byzantine art. He received a prize for the best dissertation dealing with an art historical subject on Eastern Europe, awarded jointly by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (1977). Numerous fellowships, awards, and distinctions followed this first award. Professor Curéié was the chairman of his department (1988-1990) and has served in a variety of other positions at Princeton, most recently as director of the Program in Hellenic Studies. Outside his university, he was a member of the Senior Fellows Committee at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (19831989), a member of the UNESCO Mission to Kosovo in 2003, and a member of the UNESCO Experts Committee on the Rehabilitation and Safeguarding of Cultural Heritage in Kosovo (formed by the Director-General of UNESCO in 2005).
He became a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade (1997), and an honorary member of the Christian Archaeological Society, Athens (2004). These are only the highlights of a rich professional career that has produced many books, scholarly articles, papers, and lectures presented nationally and internationally. Some aspects of his scholarship, especially related to Byzantine architecture, bear further elaboration, and I shall focus my comments here on these.
Many years ago, in conversation, I asked him what had persuaded him to become an architectural historian rather than a practicing architect. With little hesitation he answered that his decision had depended on job opportunities and environments: he decided that if he found a job in Belgrade, he would be a practicing architect, but if he found a job in the United States, he would become an architectural historian. Today we know that his choice resulted in a successful professional career and that he established himself as one of the world’s leading scholars of Byzantine art and especially architecture.
One may ask why he dedicated his career to Byzantine studies. It would seem that the rich Byzantine heritage of his native country made a great impact on his scholarly choice.
Slobodan Curéi¢’s architectural training created an important foundation for his research and studies of Byzantine architecture, leading to a deeper understanding of a building’s structure, construction techniques, and design.
From the beginning, archaeological investigation and site surveys played an important role. He knew that without first-hand contact with architectural remains on the site, whether of an individual building or an entire complex, one cannot develop a full understanding and deliver accurate judgments of their original design, purpose, and meaning. Thus, Slobodan Cur¢éi¢ was involved in archaeological fieldwork and site surveys throughout his career. As archaeologist, architect-surveyor, and architectural historian, he was in charge of the theoretical reconstruction of the Late Roman hippodrome at Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica, Yugoslavia). He later undertook a study of the architecture and architectural history of the Martorana in Palermo, Sicily.
He was also involved in a study of the excavated remains of an Early Christian basilica at Nemea in Greece, and served as architectural historian-archaeologist for the archaeological excavation of ancient Marion (modern Polis) in Cyprus, to mention only a few important undertakings. More recently, we were both engaged in the field investigation and study for the joint project “Corpus of Late Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture of Serbia 1355-1459.” Unfortunately, the project was abruptly discontinued in the 1990s as a result of the political situation in the Balkans, and resulted in only one volume, devoted to the fourteenth-century monastery church of Naupara (Belgrade, 2000).
Slobodan’s scholarly contributions are not limited to architectural analysis of the major Byzantine monuments from different time periods of Byzantine history, but also reveal specific architectural issues including analysis of style through the articulation of church facades, the question of local and regional workshops, design and structural innovations in Early Byzantine architecture, analysis of the relevance and irrelevance of space in Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture. The most focused attention is on medieval and Byzantine architecture in the Balkans, discussed below. I would like first to comment on his achievements in the study of Late Antique and Byzantine architecture in general.
A specific interest in Late Antique palaces and their architectural and urban settings resulted in a study and re-examination of fundamental aspects of palatine architecture [“Late Antique Palaces: The Meaning of Urban Context,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 67-90]. By parallel analysis of remaining examples of Late Antique and Early Byzantine palaces, Curéi¢ emphasized their urban character. For example, he proposed convincingly that the so-called palace of Diocletian in Split was a small city with a palace within it. Furthermore, he demonstrated that certain urban architectural forms—baths, triumphal arches located close to the palace entrances—were appropriated from the urban context and applied in palatine architecture. As Curéi¢ writes, “during this period city gates—at least on a symbolic level—began to be associated with imperial palaces.”
The investigation of Late Antiquity remained one of the important questions in Curéié’s scholarly work. One of his articles examines how monotheistic ideas made an impact on the formation of the architectural space in Late Antiquity [“From the Temple of the Sun to the Temple of the Lord: Monotheistic Contribution to Architectural Iconography in Late Antiquity,” Architectural Studies in Memory of Richard Krautheimer, ed. C. L. Striker (Mainz, 1996), 55-9]. By exploring a variety of examples, he confirmed the planning prototype of a single centralized building situated in the center of a vast rectangular court enclosed by a wall. Exploring various models, from Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun to the mausolea of Maxentius and Constantine and the related church of the Holy Apostles, to numerous Early Christian examples of freestanding church buildings in large open courtyards, he concluded that all represent a very broad framework in which a similar iconographic model is repeated. The model’s conceptual consistency and its repetition over a long period of time, from the pagan worshippers to early Christians, coincided with the increasing significance of monotheism focused on the cult of the sun god.
Thus Curéié believed that the planning objectives of Roman imperial mausolea and early Christian churches in large open courtyards originate in monotheism. In his own words, “the architectural scheme ... was the most suitable iconographic formula for conveying the concept of the oneness of God and His central place in the Universe.”
The role of religious beliefs and practices in the daily lives of the Byzantines and their impact on the design of secular architecture—more specifically on the house—held a special interest for Curéi¢. One of his studies defined what is meant by the term “house” and explored what made Byzantine houses different from earlier examples. [“The House in the Byzantine World,” in Everyday Life in Byzantium, ed. D. Papanikola-Bakirtzi (Athens, 2002), 228-38]. Elaborating on the newest archaeological finds of Byzantine residential architecture, Curéi¢ further emphasized that in the early periods, between the late fourth and mid sixth centuries, a single feature distinguished a Christian Byzantine house from its pagan counterpart—its private place for worship. Although identification of the worship place or private chapel is not an easy task in the early period, Curéi¢ pointed out a few examples where the miniature basilican form of the space and orientation of the apse revealed its religious function within the house property.
Through further archaeological examples he concluded that large private houses of the Middle Byzantine period incorporated private chapels within residential complexes, while the category of modest houses from the same period is more difficult to assess. Combining a few archaeological finds with more informative written sources that record possession of icons in private households, Curéié concluded that these houses did not have private chapels, “but that an icon, or several icons on their walls may have served a comparable purpose.” Additional change occurred in the later development of private houses in smaller cities and in village settlements of the Late Byzantine period with a new phenomenon— the appearance of semi-private “neighborhood” churches.
Curéi¢é also reexamined urban and architectural developments in the city of Thessalonike during Late Antiquity [Some Observations and Questions Regarding Early Christian Architecture in Thessaloniki (Thessalonike, 2000)]. Admitting at the outset that although the city “truly holds pride of place among the cities of the world of Late Antiquity,” paradoxically the major Early Christian buildings and their history remained obscure. According to Curéié, “the history of Early Christian Thessaloniki is yet to be written.” In his study Curéi¢é primarily concentrated on the building history, original function, and later transformation of the celebrated Rotunda. Through meticulous parallel analysis of currently available historical, archaeological, and architectural sources, he proposed conclusions “outlined strictly as working hypotheses.” We cannot predict if future investigation will turn hypothesis into fact, but the proposed solutions look promising.
Although the Rotunda remained his focus, he reconsidered it in a broader relationship to other important buildings of Early Christian Thessalonike. He concluded that the Rotunda was begun as a mausoleum for Emperor Constantine the Great in 322-323; Constantine later changed his plans and built a new mausoleum for himself in Constantinople. Damaged by an earthquake in 363, the Rotunda remained semi-ruinous and was repaired and converted into a Christian church by Emperor Theodosius I ca. 390. In the sixth century, during the special circumstances that affected the city’s original cathedral, the Rotunda presumably replaced it as the Episcopal Church. The building later underwent extensive repairs in the course of the ninth century, not in the seventh as was assumed earlier. Finally, “certainly before 904,” the function of cathedral was returned to Hagia Sophia. All the statements in this conclusion represent a new challenging proposal in part grounded in the artifacts and in part still awaiting archaeological confirmation. Even as a working hypothesis, however, they offer a fresh breath to scholarship and point to new directions for further investigation.
The medieval and Byzantine Balkans, its architecture, art, and history are among the major fields of investigation in Curtic’s scholarship. His annotated bibliography dedicated to the art and architecture of the Balkans was the first of its kind and will remain as a landmark for further investigation [Art and Architecture in the Balkans: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston, MA, 1984)]. He also raises the question of the Eastern and Western scholarly traditions in Byzantine studies and the relationship between them.
The historiography of architectural and archaeological investigation in the Balkans is yet to be written, but some of the basic studies dedicated to the art and architecture of the Balkans date from the beginning of the twentieth century and were written by French (C. Diehl; G. Millet), Russian (P. P. Pokryshkin; N. P. Kondakov) and English (A. Van Millingen; F. H. Jackson) scholars. The engagement of foreign scholars was related to actual political circumstances at the beginning of the twentieth century. The fundamental studies related to art and architecture written by foreigners had a decisive impact on regional scholarship and on national historiographies (Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian). It is also important to mention that the periodization schemes and divisions into local schools established in these early studies have been significantly challenged by recent investigation, necessitating a serious historiographical re-examination.
An additional problem in current scholarship is the language barrier. During the second half of the twentieth century, significant archaeological and field investigations were undertaken in various regions of the Balkans, resulting in individual or case studies related to the Byzantine and medieval heritage. Although some of those studies were published in English or French, most of them were never translated from the local languages, including very important reports from field investigations. Some crucial results of current scholarship therefore remain known only to a limited extent. Numerous conferences organized on either side of the East-West language barrier often resulted in partial knowledge of the scholarly problems becoming entrenched within these parallel lines of scholarship, only on rare occasions being overcome.
In contrast, Slobodan Curti¢’s scholarly work is equally well informed about Eastern as well as Western scholarship. Because of his knowledge of Slavic and major West European languages, he remains equally engaged on both sides and in both scholarly worlds. These intercultural skills have proved fundamentally important for his scholarly work, both in interpretation and dissemination.
The fourteenth-century church of the Dormition at Graéanica Monastery (Kosovo), founded by the Serbian king Stefan Uros II Milutin, received its first monographic treatment, in both English and Serbian, at the hands of Slobodan Curtié. This book remains the most important study of Serbian architecture published in English [Gracanica: King Milutin’s Church and its Place in Late Byzantine Architecture (University Park, PA, 1979)]. Designed and built by the best Byzantine builders brought by King Milutin to Serbia, Gracanica is a jewel of Late Byzantine architectural design. The five-domed church with its slim drums reaches a great height—an elevation of architectural form not found elsewhere in Late Byzantine architecture. Curéié analyzed all aspects of its architectural design, from the planning pattern, structural design, building techniques, and facade decoration, to the proportion and scale of the entirety. Analyzing its place in Late Byzantine architecture, Curéi¢ concluded that although its architectural design is related to the architecture of Thessalonike, the church of the Dormition at Gracanica “exceeds its presumed models in the sophistication of its planning and the formal integration of its component parts, resulting in a pronounced accentuation of its verticality.”
One of the important questions that Curéié posed is the original function of King Milutin’s foundation and whether it was built to serve as a royal mausoleum. Analyzing all the relevant sources and material artifacts, he concluded that the church was indeed intended for Milutin’s own burial but was subsequently abandoned for political reasons. Curéi¢’s conclusion about the original function of Graéanica remains unchallenged in contemporary scholarship.
Curéie’s research into the Late Byzantine architecture of the Balkans resulted in an important study of the articulation of Serbian church facades in the first half of the fourteenth century as the result of mutual influences from Byzantine and Western building traditions. According to Curéi¢, input from the Adriatic coast in some cases resulted in the establishment of local workshops that profoundly influenced regional architectural practices [“Two Examples of Local Building Workshops in Fourteenth-Century Serbia,” Zograf 7 (1977): 45-51].
Curtié also reconsidered the city of Thessalonike and its influence on architectural developments in the Late Byzantine period [The Role of Late Byzantine Thessalonike in Church Architecture in the Balkans,” DOP 57 (2003): 65-84]. Concentrating on the ecclesiastical architecture of the period and especially on the architectural design and articulation of domes, he concluded that “the hallmark of Thessalonian building practice, as it emerged during the first two decades of the fourteenth century, was a very distinctive type of church dome.” He therefore proposed the use of the new term “Thessalonian dome.” His proposition was based on certain architectural characteristics in the design of the domes created in Thessalonike: “polygonal in plan, its corners are marked by rounded colonnettes, while its faces feature triple-arched skewbacks, the innermost one framing a single-light window.”
This specific building paradigm, according to Curéié, became the favorite type and spread over the wider region of the Balkans. He concluded that the role of Thessalonike as the center of major architectural activity in the first decades of the fourteenth century was related to the reconstitution of the Byzantine Empire, followed by economic recovery and the emergence of a new idiosyncratic architectural style and building manner that “came out as a blending of experience brought in by builders from Epiros and the Empire of Nicaea.” Elaborating further on the role of Thessalonike in the development of fourteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture in the Balkans, Curéi¢ pointed out that this influence was restricted both geographically and chronologically. It was paralleled by the influx of building methods from Epiros, “emanating at the time from another newly risen prosperous center city of Ohrid,” and later from the third major center of regional architectural production—Skopje, the capital of Stefan DuSan’s short-lived Serbo-Greek Empire.
Secular medieval and Byzantine architecture in the Balkans, a subject which had never been articulated in historiography, was the significant scholarly agenda undertaken by Slobodan Curéié and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos, who organized a major exhibition, the first of its kind, and edited a book entitled Secular Medieval Architecture in the Balkans 1300-1500 and its Preservation (Thessalonike, 1997). Ninety-four secular architectural monuments from nine Balkan countries were represented in the exhibition and its catalogue, which addressed urban entities, town fortifications, fortresses, citadels and forts, towers, palaces and houses, public baths and water supply, and industrial buildings and bridges. The significance for scholarship of both exhibition and catalogue is enormous in two ways: the exhibition brought to light a little-known and understudied category of architectural heritage, and the catalogue is the first publication of its kind, since no general book on any aspect of medieval architecture in the Balkans existed previously. I highlight some of its complex subject matter.
In the introductory chapter entitled “The Age of Insecurity,” Curdi¢ notes the historical circumstances and turbulent times that characterized the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Balkans and the variety of phenomena affecting its built environment. Paradoxically, and most surprising under the circumstances, is the revival of urbanism. Although Thessalonike and Constantinople retained their continuous urban presence during the medieval period, the revival applies not to these two cities but to numerous other centers along the Adriatic coastline and in the Balkan hinterland, clearly spurred by the rise of commerce in the region. Examples included Trogir, Split, and Hvar in Croatia; Kotor (Cattaro) in Montenegro; Shumen in Bulgaria; and Redina, Geraki, and Mystra in Greece. Commenting on another important category of buildings, fortifications, Curtié concludes, “fortifications of one kind or another constituted about two-thirds of all building in the Balkans between 1300 and 1500.” During times of insecurity spawned by wars and destruction, this building category included great variety, for “no entity —a town, a village, a palace, a mining establishment, a monastery, a house—could be considered safe unless placed behind solid walls.” Curéi¢ continues “the great emphasis given fortification architecture ... reflects certain dark realities of the period in question.”
Analyzing further all the relevant secular architectural categories included in the exhibition, Curéié concludes, “Confronting the problems of secular medieval architecture in the Balkans ... illustrates not only major lacunae in our knowledge, but also distortions in our own perceptions. Architecture, in this case—as in the past—is merely a convenient vehicle for gauging larger issues. Looking at it, not as mute walls, but as documents recording the past, makes us far more sensitive to the environment we live in, but also to the forces which have shaped it, and to the cultures we belong to. Doing justice to this task requires professional responsibility, and professional training. New research tools offer new possibilities, but their effectiveness will only be proportional to the skills of those who use them.”
Curéi¢ further contributes to the study of regional architectural developments in the Balkans in the book chapter dedicated to church architecture in Bulgaria from the fourth to the nineteenth centuries [Function and Form. Church Architecture in Bulgaria, 4th-19th Centuries,” in Treasures of Christian Art in Bulgaria, ed. V. Pace (Sofia, 2001), 46-66]. At the outset Curéi¢ asserts that important architectural developments from Late Antiquity through the medieval period and beyond remain substantially unknown in the scholarship outside Bulgaria. Commenting briefly on the historical and political circumstances that produced this situation, Curéi¢ concentrates on physical evidence of architectural heritage that may provide new insights into the history of ecclesiastical architecture in the region. Through precise and meticulous analysis of ecclesiastical architecture through the centuries, he discusses not only Byzantine influences, but also regional developments that resulted in idiosyncrasies often recognized as local style.
A serious reconsideration of the terms “provincial” versus “regional” in architectural developments in Cyprus is yet one more among Curtic’s inspiring, witty, and challenging studies in the field of Byzantine architecture [Middle Byzantine Architecture on Cyprus: Provincial or Regional? (Nicosia, 2000)]. In challenging the word “provincial” (attributed to Cypriot architectural developments in earlier scholarship), understood as the relationship of “inferiority” juxtaposed with the “superiority” of the center (Constantinople), Curéié shows us the distinctive regional architectural characteristics of Cyprus in the Middle Byzantine period. Although the church architecture of Cyprus shares many characteristics with contemporary developments in other parts of the Byzantine world (small scale, typological variety, and painted fagades—unfortunately most of them have lost their colorful surfaces), it is important to recognize many idiosyncratic features, some of them due to local climatic factors and frequent earthquakes, which clearly designate regional and not provincial style.
Recognizing the Balkan cultural heritage and its proper integration into the European context, as both authors stated in the preface to the exhibition catalogue of “Secular Medieval Architecture in the Balkans,” is an issue that has significantly influenced Curéi¢’s most recent undertakings. The unfortunate recent history of the Balkans and the turbulence that has affected all Balkan peoples to a greater or lesser degree resulted in the unprecedented destruction of architectural monuments in some regions. As an internationally acclaimed scholar of Byzantine and medieval architecture in the Balkans, Curéié was included in the expert team of a UNESCO Mission to Kosovo (2003) and he is a member of a UNESCO International Committee of Experts on Cultural Heritage in Kosovo (2005-). Confronted, as an eyewitness, by the great destruction of cultural monuments, he reacted as a scholar but as a humanist as well, publishing several related articles, including an extensive study (“Heritage,” in Kosovo. Christian Orthodox Heritage and Contemporary Catastrophe, ed. A. Lidov (Moscow, 2007), 17-160).
As a professor of Byzantine art and architecture, Curéi¢ has lectured on a variety of topics from Early Christian to Late Byzantine and beyond, including some aspects of architectural history in general. His lectures are scholarly, inspiring, and witty, and are warmly received by their audiences. He has also organized a great number of seminars for his students on a variety of topics related to Early Christian and Byzantine art and architecture. They included Byzantine palaces, Byzantine monasteries, liturgical and functional aspects of Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture, chapels and their function, Byzantine fortifications, the meaning and function of the tower in Byzantium, and the Byzantine house. Often present at these seminars, sometimes in the audience, other times as a speaker, I was always impressed by the way he involved his students in fruitful discussions, sharpening their judgments and opening new horizons of knowledge. He also organized fieldwork for his students, bringing them to Byzantine and medieval sites as members of the archaeological and survey teams. One of these expeditions in the 1990s included work on our joint project, “The Corpus of Late Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture of Serbia 1355-1459.” Students from both Princeton and Belgrade universities were engaged in the architectural survey of medieval churches and had extraordinary opportunities to experience both the originality of the monuments and the rigor of site work.
Curéié has supervised many doctoral dissertations both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Princeton University. Many of his students have followed their professor in pursuing academic careers as scholars of Byzantine art and architecture. The best testimony to his successful professorship one may find in this volume with the fine scholarly contributions of his students.
Slobodan Curéié’s recent exhibition dedicated to Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture, organized in collaboration with Evangelia Hadjitryphonos, was entitled “Architecture as Icon.” It opened in Thessaloniki in the fall of 2009 and then traveled to Princeton in 2010.
During many years of fruitful scholarship Slobodan Curéi¢ worked consistently on a major study dedicated to the architectural history of the Balkans. This colossal undertaking has resulted in a massive book, just published, entitled Architecture in the Balkans from Diocletian to Siileyman the Magnificent (ca. 300 — ca. 1550) (London and New Haven, 2010). This is not only the first book of its kind; it is also a jewel in the crown of a successful career.
I salute a remarkable professor, an extraordinary scholar, and a dear friend.
Introduction: Approaches to Byzantine Architecture and the Contribution of Slobodan Curéi¢
Mark J. Johnson, Robert Ousterhout, and Amy Papalexandrou
In this volume, 14 students of Slobodan Curéié present chapters on Byzantine architecture, representing the wide variety of topics and approaches inspired by his teaching and mentoring over the past four decades.’ Taken together, the chapters provide a useful overview of the methodologies currently employed in the study of Byzantine architecture, as well as revealing the broad range and rich repertory of monuments. In this introduction, we attempt to situate the contributions of Curéié and his students more broadly within the scholarship on Byantine architecture of the last half century.
While much has changed since Professor Curéi¢é began his own investigations, what may be most apparent from a perusal of the present volume is the relativenewness of Byzantine architecture asa subject of scholarly enquiry. Few Byzantine buildings have received basic documentation, let alone thorough examination. The monographic examination of a building may now seem quaint and recherché for other periods of architecture, but for Byzantium it remains an absolute necessity.” In areas of rapid development, demographic changes, and conflict, the buildings often disappear before they can be properly studied. Of the Anatolian churches Gertrude Bell visited in the early twentieth century, for example, fewer than half still stand, and those are considerably worse for wear.’ Some of the most significant buildings, such as the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, San Vitale in Ravenna, Hosios Loukas and Daphne in Greece, HH. Sergios and Bakchos, and even Hagia Sophia in Istanbul await detailed, authoritative studies to this day.
Many of the most important monuments have preserved no written documentation at all, and thus basic questions of chronology remain to be sorted out. Such is the case with several of the churches of Thessalonike, where it is unclear whether we accept revised (if perhaps controversial) dating provided by dendrochronology or the traditional dating from inscriptions and mosaic decoration. Is H. Sophia seventh-century or later?4 Was the Holy Apostles built during the patriarchate of Niphon or afterwards?° The rock-cut churches of Cappadocia are similarly problematic: for the main monuments of the Gdreme region, French and American scholars prefer dates in the tenth and eleventh centuries, while German and Turkish scholars prefer the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The dramatic changes between Byzantine and Seljuk control of the region after 1071 make the issues surrounding context all the more important. Similar questions of chronology now challenge our notion of the Byzantine investment in the Pelopponese, as well as the interaction of Byzantines and Latins in the thirteenth century.’ The church of the Dormition at Merbaka, a linchpin in A. H. S. Megaw’s relative chronology, has now convincingly been redated from the twelfth to the late thirteenth century. In a like manner, Buchwald’s relative chronology of the Laskarid monuments of western Asia Minor is called into question by a late twelfth-century-dated inscription found at the Panagia Krina, a building which he placed firmly under Laskarid patronage.’ Because of dramatic political changes, a fixed date is crucial if we are to understand the context under which a building came into being.
Byzantine architecture is also a field fraught with challenges: to paraphrase one recent critic, Byzantine architecture is “an elusive concept built upon evidence that would be thrown out in any court of law.”? The Byzantine Empire lasted for more than a millennium, and if we take into consideration areas under its influence, such as Russia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, even longer. Its geographic scope is similarly broad, now spanning modern nation-states not always friendly with each other and not always easy of access to foreign scholars. Both the historical languages and those of modern scholarship are rich and varied, and there seem to be more than any single human being could possibly master in a lifetime. The student of Byzantine architecture is thus challenged to be intrepid as a diplomat, an explorer, an archaeologist, and a linguist, not to mention a scholar with a discerning eye.
Methodologies
The approach of Professor Curéié, which he continued from his mentor Richard Krautheimer, begins with formal analysis—the basic typology and taxonomy of buildings. This approach occasionally has been criticized for its shortcomings. As Cyril Mango writes, “buildings are labeled and pigeon-holed like biological specimens according to formal criteria: where a resemblance is found a connection is assumed even across a wide gulf in time and space.”” Indeed, an emphasis on this approach may assume that typological analysis is the desired end-result rather than the necessary beginning of a study, or that typology is the primary criterion to determine dating. Nevertheless, if the monuments consitute our primary evidence and the basis for our conclusions concerning the field of study in general, we are obliged to learn all we can about them, including their physical structure, closely observed. In the absence of texts, the forms become all the more important. Mango concedes, “Buildings provide the most tangible and concrete legacy of a past civilization. They are historical ‘documents,’ no less so than written documents; in some cases they even speak with a clearer voice than the written word.”"
Thus, a good formal analysis tells us what we have to work with. It is essential to know such basics as what to expect in terms of regional production and period styles, and how to distinguish original construction from later repairs. A traditional typological analysis emphasizes similarities, but it can be just as useful in isolating and clarifying differences, whether regional, chronological, functional, or economic. A focused study of a single building type across a broad geographical framework, properly considered, such as W. Eugene Kleinbauer’s study of the aisled tetraconch, Charalambos Bouras’s examination of the domed-octagon church type, or Professor Curéié’s analysis of subsidiary chapels, can tell us much about architectural practices and cultural relations.” Similarities in type also become useful in the study of buildings serving similar functions, such as baptisteries or mausolea.”
Even more important, the close examination—that is, on the ground and in situ—of individual buildings continues to sustain and inform all subsequent analyses. Reading the archaeological record remains a basic and indispensable tool, whether of excavated remains, published reports, or standing walls. In this regard the positivist approach, while not in vogue according to current academic trends, cannot yet be relinquished by the Byzantine architectural historian. An accurate architectural history cannot be written without buildings, and the architectural historian should be able to “read” a building with the same nuance and sophistication a philologist would apply to a text. Other approaches to Byzantine architecture are of course possible and desirable, as the current volume attests, but a close examination of the physical remains ideally underlies and augments other methodologies. Indeed, familiarity with the building lends authority to all other approaches.
Other methodologies have characterized studies of Byzantine architecture: symbolic or ideological, functional, and social or economic.’* A symbolic or ideological interpetation is often based on texts that tell us how to interpret architectural forms, as in Procopios’s description of Hagia Sophia or Patriarch Germanos’s Historia Mystogogica.’° Thus, for example, Martin Harrison’s excavations of the church of H. Polyeuktos in Istanbul turned up fragments of the dedicatory inscription. Known in complete form from the Palatine anthology, the inscription claimed that Juliana “surpassed the wisdom of the celebrated Solomon, raising a temple to receive God.” Harrison was able to suggest the symbolic association of the church with Solomon’s Temple based not simply on the inscription, but on the building’s dimensions and architectural decoration, which he had examined closely."
But symbolism need not rely on a text. The repetiton of symbolic forms, as for example appear in baptisteries or mausolea, may also be understood in this context.!? Although style is rarely discussed in Byzantine texts, the dissemination of architectural style may have ideological or symbolic implications, as Professor Curéi¢ discusses in relation to Serbian architecture, and Robert Ousterhout discusses in relation to early Ottoman architecture.’
In addition to aiding in our understanding of symbolism, written sources have other information to offer. Texts describing lost buildings, such as the church of the Holy Apostles or the Nea Ekklesia or the Pharos church in Constantinople, tell us much about how the Byzantines perceived the church interior.’ While chronicles and saints’ lives have long been mined for information about Byzantine buildings and their decoration, other written sources, such as typika and foundation documents can provide aditional insights. As Mark J. Johnson explores in his chapter, issues of chronology, context, and patrons’ motives lie hidden within written sources that have been overlooked or underutilized. Similarly, archival research yields new information from forgotten fieldnotes and photographs, as Robert Ousterhout demonstrates in this volume.
A functional or liturgical approach must rely ona variety of data beyond the physical structure of the building, ranging from archaeological assemblages to liturgical texts. Thomas Mathews’s seminal study of liturgical planning would not have been possible without careful observations on building typology, combined with the physical evidence of internal partitions and furnishings.”° The relationship between form and function is not nearly as strong as earlier generations, steeped in the modernist tradition, would have it. While in very general terms, the change from longitudinal buildings to centrally-planned buildings parallels a change in the liturgy, as Mathews has proposed, it may be impossible to say whether the change in architectural forms responded to a functional change, or vice versa. While some accommodation is made for liturgical use in all periods, we might argue that the liturgy played only a small role in the creation of new architectural forms, for many new architectural designs cannot be easily explained in functional terms. The aisled tetraconch church, for example, as at S. Lorenzo in Milan or at Selucia Pieria by Antioch, created a complex layering of interrelated spaces that has much more to do with the aesthetics of geometry than with the liturgy. Indeed, it remains unclear where within these buildings the altar was placed.*! Similarly, the symmetrical tripartite sanctuary of later churches makes sense in architectural terms, even though the diakonikon was often unnecessary liturgically and given a separate function.”
Moving beyond typology and liturgy, a functional approach can lead to a deeper appreciation of context. This may require a close examination of the larger setting of the building, as well as the details of its decoration. While our best-preserved buildings are usually churches, they may be more particularly defined as parish churches, cathedrals, monastic katholika, private family chapels, or funerary chapels. The specific function of a building may add nuance to the reading of its pictorial decoration. The details of a Cappadocian church, for example, may read differently against a backdrop of monastic or domestic usage.*? Examining function, architecture, and pictorial decoration together, as Ida Sinkevic does in her chapter, can reveal much about the contemporary view and use of a particular building.
Interest in funerary architecture has been of particular importance in this respect, as it has encouraged detailed analyses of buildings within specific functional contexts, which, in turn, have encouraged investigation of the central role of commemorative monuments within Late Antique and Byzantine society. Recent studies have emphasized a structure’s place within a surrounding urban or monastic framework or invited speculation about the sensory and ritual events that have taken place within or around them, as we see in the chapters by Amy Papalexandrou and Katherine Marsengill. There are also problems of interpretation of the physical remains, since the evidence may be ambiguous. As Stephen Hill once asked regarding the Alahan Manastir1, when is a monastery not a monastery?™ While its contemporary name suggests that was once a monastery, the isolated Cilician complex may more likely have been a pilgrimage center. Similarly, are the rock-cut complexes of Cappadocia monastic or secular? Their modern names often suggest monastic function, although a careful analysis of the physical remains does not.”
Functional considerations also intersect formal considerations in the study of specific building components, as signalled by Professor Curtic’s response to Gordana Babic’s study of subsidiary chapels.*° While Babi¢ concentrated on the textual information and the decorative programs in order to determine the specific commemorative functions of auxiliary chapels, Curéié situated the same within purely architectonic considerations. Historic builders clearly responded to a variety of requirements imposed by their patrons, but ultimately they had to translate these into architectural terms. The orderliness and concern for basic compositional principles highlighted by Professor Curéi¢ indicates that formal aspects of design remain a constant, at least in public architecture. More recent studies of lateral aisles and ambulatories follow in the same line.*”
Secular Architecture
One of the exciting directions in the field has been the development of a greater interest in secular architecture, a direction Professor Curci¢ championed inhis graduate seminars, publications, and in a number of dissertations he has supervised. The catalogue of secular architecture in the late medieval Balkans, which Professor Curéi¢ edited in collaboration with Evangelia Hadjitriphonos in 1997, divided the material into urban entities, town fortifications, fortresses, citadels/forts, towers, palaces/houses, public buildings, public baths, and water supply.’ The state of research varies for these topics. Defensive architecture in all its aspects has long been explored, but the subject requires a new overview that highlights the Byzantine contribution, as Professor Curéi¢ emphasized in his Princeton seminar on fortifications.” One of his first graduate seminars at the University of Illinois concerned towers, an interest that continues with some of his most recent publications® and in the work of his students. These seminars, indeed, led to several chapters in the present volume.
For Byzantine domestic architecture, Charalambos Bouras remains one of the few scholars to attempt a synthetic overview, but our base of knowledge has increased dramatically since the publication of his important articles.*! Ousterhout and Curéi¢ have both contributed to this area in exhibition catalogue essays,” and the Byzantine house was the subject of Professor Curéié’s 2004 seminar at Princeton. Ongoing excavations and surveys have resulted in significant new evidence, which continues to appear at Corinth, in the Athenian Agora, at Amorion, in Cappadocia, and elsewhere.* Publications of the Byzantine settlements at Pergamon, Canh Kilise, Cyprus, and elsewhere have added to the discussion, as have the burgeoning body of literature on urbanism after Antiquity.“ Studies of domestic architecture have emphasized the intersection of public and private, religious and secular in the domestic sphere.*®
New investigations of urban infrastructures are also significant. Studies of the water systems of Thessalonike and Constantinople have yielded important information. The detailed examination of the history and extent of Constantinople’s water system in conjunction with the Anastasian Wall and the cisterns within the city underlines the strategic significance of water to the Byzantine capital in its early centuries. Indeed, it constitutes an exciting new chapter in the history of the city.*° Similarly, the water system of Thessalonike seems to have played a critical role during the conquest of the city by the Ottomans, while the discovery and mapping of watermills helps us understand the role of industry and agriculture within the late Byzantine city and its hinterland.*”
While these investigations have dramatically expanded our knowledge of daily life and military technology, there is a concomitant danger of Byzantine architecture becoming a subset of archaeology or of social history. To utilize the Vitruvian terminology, utilitas becomes our main concern, with firmitas a distant second, and venustas not at all. While recognizing the contribution of archaeology, Professor Curéi¢ has countered this development with an emphasis on the aesthetics of Byzantine architecture.* In this instance, he has succeeded in making the old new, by insisting on the validity of an approach that had fallen out of favor. At the same time, these new areas of investigation have considerably broadened the field of study, and they allow a discourse on architecture that addresses all levels of society.
Structure and Construction
Structural engineers have also looked to Byzantine monuments, as new methods of analysis have become available. Their investigations have been limited primarily to large-scale buildings, such as Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, for which the structural performance of the building through its history is documented, while its structural system was flawed from the inception.*” New methods of computer-aided structural modelling suggest new avenues of analysis, but they are not without their critics. Roland Mainstone, for example, argues for the value of common sense and the welltrained eye.*° Few small Byzantine buildings have been subjected to structural analysis, but in these the emphasis was more on construction than structure.*! Another new direction is to examine Byzantine architecture from the point of view of its builders, asking the sorts of questions that an oikodomos might ask, as Ousterhout has done.” The next step to be taken in this regard is in the direction of logistics or ergonomics, in calculating and quantifying the manpower and materials required for a given project.*
Cultural Interchange
While recent events have shifted interests toward the Islamic world, the critical diplomatic role played by the Byzantine Empire during the Middle Ages is often overlooked.“ Historically Byzantium held the strategic position as the negotiator between East and West, and the political encounters are reflected in Byzantine cultural production. Within Constantinople itself, there is literary testimony for the construction of Islamic-style palaces and pavilions, as well as surviving examples of Western-introduced architectural forms, ranging from flying buttresses to stained glass. At the same time, an examination of building at the margins of the Byzantine world can be as instructive as a similar study at its center. From early in his career, Professor Curéié has probed the interactions between Byzantine builders and their counterparts from other regions. In his dissertation and subsequent book on the church of the Dormition at Graéanica and in a series of articles, Professor Curdié examined the interactions of differing building traditions in medieval Serbia against the backdrop of political affiliations of the day.* He later applied a similar analysis to the intersections of Byzantine, Norman, and North African architectural traditions in the architecture of Sicily.”°
Other Approaches
Other directions include historiographical studies, as in the essays by Christina Maranci and Matthew Milliner in this volume, which examine the history of the discipline alongside its early progenitors and their various methodologies. This approach has encouraged introspection and created a critical awareness of our own scholarly tendencies and theoretical foundations. Professor Curéié has long been interested in historiography, having given a graduate seminar on the topic in 1998 that was followed by a colloquium at Princeton on “The Balkans: Medieval Architecture and Historiography.” Historiography has also served to bring architectural historians into fruitful dialogue with other disciplines in the humanities, whose relationship with the topic is often longer and more developed. The result has afforded a better understanding of where our own scholarly roots fit into a larger picture of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual milieu.”
Other approaches tend to be contextual in nature, emphasizing, for example, the minutiae of a building or site as critical elements for exposing the function or meaning of a particular architectural space. The inclusion of re-used antiquities, or spolia, provides one example of a constructional or sometimes decorative element that can hold interpretive possibilities for the architectural historian and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of a building’s history or the motive forces of a patron, as Dale Kinney has discussed and as Ludovico Geymonat contributes in this volume.*
Monumental inscriptions and reconsideration of their appearance and placement on buildings have revealed additional layers of meaning aside from their presumed documentary role.” Contextual approaches may also implicate the greater surroundings, as for example topographical studies in which authors seek to understand a building through its place in the landscape or its relationship to other structures nearby. Hugh Elton’s study of the Gdksu region is Cilicia, for example, has attempted to place buildings into a broad context, as does Nikolas Bakirtzis’s chapter in this volume.” The ultimate scholarly objective is to recreate the social history of buildings, especially the interaction of non-elite builders or users—as opposed to the emperors and aristocrats who have typically been our only point of access into the culture— with their architectural environment.
Afterlife and Preservation
While many studies focus on the moment of conception or initial construction, one recent trend in site studies is to appropach architecture diachronically, looking at a building as the sum of its history. For example, the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem only makes sense architecturally when its three medieval phases are carefully analyzed.*! Giilru Necipoglu’s important examination of Hagia Sophia as a mosque brings to the fore an afterlife unknown to most Byzantinists, noting the necessity of creating an Ottoman context and an Islamic prehistory for the building.”
All too often later histories, with conflicting claims of ownership and identity, are issued a tacit damnatio memoriae, as for example occurred with the Ottoman interventions in the Byzantine churches of Thessalonike. With the exception of the minaret of the Rotunda, physical evidence of later histories has been almost completely excised from this city, while the churches were restored to their Byzantine period appearance. Byzantine churches that continue to function as mosques in Muslim countries remain difficult to study properly in their historical context.
Nationalist concerns often play a role: while the Parthenon in Athens was built as a temple, it functioned considerably longer as a church and a mosque, but evidence of the later religious uses were swept away in the nationalist fervor of the nineteenth century.* Manoles Korres’s careful detective work on the Acropolis, for example, brings back to light an important period in that building’s history.“ Similarly, the privileging of the Classical at archaeological sites often means that evidence from the Byzantine period is removed, often without full analysis.® In other instances, as for example the excavated thirteenth-century settlement at Pergamon, the Byzantine period survives only on paper.*®
Studies of later interventions can help to clarify original forms and details, but they also chronicle later appreciation and historical interpretation of a building. In this vein, the chapter by Nicola Camerlenghi in this volume investigates the later construction history of S. Paolo fuori le mura in Rome.
We have noted the relative youthfulness of the field, and that basic documentation and analysis for many Byzantine buildings is lacking even as questions remain about more well known monuments. Much work awaits the interested scholar. As this work continues with the present and future generations of scholars, it is worth recalling one of Professor Curéié’s dicta: “There is no such thing as a definitive study.” His pronouncement is not intended as a condemnation of existing scholarship, but rather an invitation to not be satisfied with past approaches and conclusions. Its intent is to encourage further research, analysis, and approaches that will continue to enrich our understanding of a fascinating field of architectural history.
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