SITUATING SACRED PORTRAITS IN THE SIXTH CENTURY RELIGIOUS SPHERE: VISUALITY IN RAVENNA

Date

2024-1

Author

Polat, Hayriye Hilal

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Despite mosaics adorning Byzantine churches across the late antique Mediterranean being meant to interact with their intended audiences in a highly ritualized setting, the scholarship has often treated them as autonomous objects. This study, instead, focuses on the relationship between vision and visuality inherent in their ritualistic function. In offering a re-reading of the Byzantine’s mind’s eye, it concentrates on mosaics adorning the late antique churches of Ravenna, placing a particular focus on how these mosaics were perceived within their ritualized setting, where sight, memory, and veneration were intersected. It will first explore the cultural attitudes towards holy figures and their representation in Early Byzantium. In what follows, the third and fourth chapters are devoted to a historiography of the late antique Ravenna, mapping out the ecclesiastical and imperial patronage of art in the fifth and sixth centuries. As such, these chapters set the necessary framework for the fifth chapter that employs spatial analysis of the mosaics adorning the churches of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, San Vitale, and Sant’Apollinare Classe. The analyses reveal the varying patterns of visibility that existed for different audience groups attending the liturgical services, namely congregational members, and the clergy. Examining mosaics adorning monumental churches of late antique Ravenna in relation to the viewing habits of the culture provides access to the diverse actors and purposes that contributed to the formation of the visual regime of Early Medieval Byzantium.

Subject Keywords

Early Medieval Byzantium, early Christian basilicas, ritual-centered visuality, mosaic, Ravenna

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/108208

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis