Galerius at Thessalonike - Oxford, 16 December 2021 (original) (raw)
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Cover Image Credit: © Rochester Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University 5 4 Welcome The conference committee wishes you all a very warm welcome to the Oxford University Byzantine Society's 21st International Graduate Conference. Byzantines considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the ancient world, a title they passionately defended against emerging empires east and west that also claimed hereditary rights to the Graeco-Roman past. From the fostering of cultural, scientific, and literary revivals and the commissioning of projects that used a well-established artistic and architectural vocabulary to the collection, conservation and display of consecrated ancient artefacts, anachronism was a powerful political and cultural tool, frequently used to build analogies with either past prosperity or a divine eternity. Including contributions on political, social, literary, architectural and artistic history, and covering geographical areas throughout the central and eastern Mediterranean and beyond, this conference aims to provide a kaleidoscopic view of how cultural heritage was constructed, perceived and maintained in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.
This article explores an important chapter in the visual memory and historical legacy of a key imperial monument of Constantinople, the bronze equestrian statue of the emperor Justinian. The sixth-century sculpture survived pillages of the Fourth Crusade to become a centerpiece of Constantinople's identity. 1 Celebrated in the tenth century as one of the wonders of Constantinople, it was re-imagined in western romances and Crusader narratives. The horseman's Justinianic identity was restored during the Palaiologan period, when the monument became a centerpiece of imperial renovation efforts. Though it was destroyed by the Ottomans after the capture of Constantinople in 1453, its international renown outlived the physical monument. This study investigates how and why the bronze equestrian monument of Justinian was remembered in late-medieval Slavic images of Constantinople by focusing particularly on an illustrated history that was produced for Tsar Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria (Vat. Slav. 2) in the mid-fourteenth century. The city of Constantinople had been a key intellectual, ideological, spiritual, and visual space of power for the Orthodox Slavs for centuries by the time that the Vatican Manasses manuscript was illustrated for Ivan Alexander ca. 1345. Although we are familiar with the many references to Constantinople in an array of sources including the Slavic pilgrimage narratives and the Russian Primary Chronicle, its visualizations have not been closely analyzed. This study investigates how the equestrian monument was re-imagined in the Vatican Manasses manuscript, which exhibits heightened interest in the equestrian monument as a symbol of Constantinople. 2 Because Constantinople was the signifier of Byzantine imperial and spiritual supremacy, it is not surprising that visual transcription and occasional transposition of Constantinopolitan "places of power" was deployed by some foreign rulers in the construction of their theater of legitimacy (Venice, Paris, Kiev, just to name a few). 3 1 These themes are explored in a monograph which I am completing, The Forgotten Colossus: Memories of Justinian's Bronze Horseman in Constantinople and Beyond. It is devoted to the biography of the equestrian monument, its changing identifications and its perceptions by various pre-modern audiences. 2 On the Vatican Manasses visual narrative, see E. Boeck, Imagining the Byzantine Past: The Perception of History in the Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2015). The manuscript was recently fully published in a color facsimile edition, Synopsis chroniki:
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