The Chora Monastery and the World of Late Byzantium

Catalog description

This seminar is envisioned as a wide-ranging exploration of the art and culture of the Late Byzantine period (thirteenth through fifteenth century), with focus upon a key monument, the church of the former Chora monastery (Kariye Camii) in Istanbul. With its superb and highly original architecture, this church preserves an outstanding ensemble of monumental mosaics, frescoes, stone carvings, funerary monuments, colored marbles and glass, and inscriptions. Additionally, we possess a substantial body of texts illuminating various aspects of the monastery’s history and, in particular, its restoration in the early fourteenth century by the statesman and scholar Theodore Metochites. The seminar will take this rich material and textual record as a point of entry into the world of Late Byzantium. Topics to be addressed include patronage and politics; artistic practice, visual aesthetics, and materiality; monasticism; death, time, and history; the interplay between art and literary culture; and Byzantium’s interactions with the wider Mediterranean world, especially Muslim-ruled Anatolia, the Slavic Balkans, and Italy. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.