In the Shadow of Hagia Sophia: an Overview of Byzantine Art
Tarih: -
Başlangıç Zamanı: Starting Time 07:30 pm ~ 09:31 pm
Associate Prof. Dr. Suna Çağaptay
Suna Çağaptay is an associate professor of archaeology in the Department of Art History at Muğla University. Trained as an archaeologist, her work focuses on the frontiers and borderlands in the medieval Mediterranean, the urban memory of later Byzantium, the afterlives of ancient cities under Christianity and Islam, and immersive technologies in archaeology and cultural heritage management. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, fieldwork, and research grants, including the Dumbarton Oaks at Harvard University, Aga Khan Islamic Art and Architecture at MIT, ANAMED, Barakat, SOAS, and the Getty Foundation. From 2017-2022, she worked for “The Impact of the Ancient City” at the University of Cambridge, funded by the European Research Council. Her publications include The First Ottoman Capital: Bursa (IB Tauris, 2020), as well as numerous book chapters and articles that have appeared in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Ortaçağ Araştırmaları Dergisi, Muqarnas, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, the Art Bulletin, Speculum, Ege Mimarlık, EI-Three, and The Turkish Studies Review. She also co-edited a volume titled Cities as Palimpsests? Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism (Oxbow Books, 2022). Since 2022, she has been leading the excavation and cultural heritage management project at Anaia (Tr. Kadıkalesi) in Aydın.
“In the Shadow of Hagia Sophia: An Overview of Byzantine Art”
The Church of Hagia Sophia is the iconic, best-measured, and most surveyed Byzantine monument. As the spiritual, imperial and cultural center of the empire, it directs and reshapes the artistic aspirations from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries. In this lecture, framed as an introduction to Byzantine art for both the LIBE 130 course and the entire TED University, I would like to throw in a few examples to help us define the character and context of Byzantine art. We will question if Byzantine art can be seen as a direct continuation of Greco-Roman art or if it simply stood for discontinuity with the Greco-Roman past. We will question how radically Christian art rejected classical learning and culture because they were unacceptably tinged with paganism and how far the innovation of Byzantine art lay in exploring non-naturalistic imagery. From a select group of examples from Hagia Sophia to the Chora, we will discuss the character and nature of pictorial life-like representations, the messages they convey, and how these images would be perceived by their contemporaries.
Webinar Link: https://tedu.zoom.us/j/98250348314