The Dome as an All-Seeing Eye: Theatre of Judgment in Byzantine Art

Catalog description

As modern viewers we enter with confidence and detachment the interiors of medieval churches. We are rarely aware of their psychological impact, placing the viewer under the watchful eye of the divine Judge depicted in the apex of the dome. By contrast, medieval viewers responded to this gaze with fear, guilt, and an urgency to repent for their sinful selves. How is this experience of abjection created? We seek answers by analyzing the spatial structuring of the visual programs and by engaging with the role the liturgy (poetry and song) plays in producing medieval subjectivity. The geographical scope includes churches in the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. The medieval material is put in conversation with modern approaches to the concepts of subjectivity, surveillance, and control (Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Marion, and Adriana Cavarero).