Eternal Victory: Byzantine Territorial Expansion and Constantinopolitan Liturgical Splendour at Hosios Loukas (Steiris, Greece)

Starting in the ninth century but gaining momentum the late tenth century Byzantium reclaimed its territories in the East: capturing Crete, Antioch, and northern Palestine. These victories were celebrated with triumphal processions in Constantinople. New chants were written specifically to be performed in the Great Church and the palatine chapels. Some of the poetry and music was composed by the emperor himself. Analyzing the melodic contour of some of these songs shows how they strategically used the acoustics of the dome to offer a glittering vision of power. And the same time, the figural mosaics in Hagia Sophia and in the palatine chapels gave an anthropomorphic concreteness to the experience of the divine in the reverberant sound. None of these figural programs survives. Yet, a monastery near Thebes (Greece), Hosios Loukas, preserves one of the most extensive Byzantine mosaic cycles. As this analysis will reveal, it channels the Constantinopolitan liturgy and enables us to explore how chant and figural images operated together to shape a vision of the resurgent empire

Painting or relief: The ideal icon in iconophile writing in Byzantium

This text is focused on the transformation of the definition of the icon in Byzantine image theory from an identification of graphe with painting in the writings of John of Damascus (ca. 675-754) to the equation of graphe with typos understood as the imprint of an intaglio on matter in the theory of Theodore Studies (759-826). The virtues of painting, therefore, are that its masters see their works admired and feel themselves to be almost like the Creator. Is it not true that painting is the mistress of all the arts or their principal ornament? If I am not mistaken, the architect took from the painter architrave's, capitals, bases, columns and pediments, and all other fine features of buildings. The stonemason, the sculptor, and all the workshops and crafts of artificers are guided by the rule and art of the painter. Indeed hardly any art, except the very meanest, can be found that does not somehow pertain to painting. So I would venture to assert that whatever beauty there is in things, it has been derived from painting

The Virgin Mary and Sainte-Foy: Chant and the Original Design of the West Façade at Conques

Using the evidence of Aquitanian chants, this article explores the possibility that a twelfth-century relief panel of the Annunciation today in the interior of Conques was originally designed for the West facade, where it completes the composition of the divine plan of Salvation. This hypothetic reconstruction also uncovers the important role of the patron saint, Sainte-Foy, and how she is promoted as second after Mary and efficacious intercessor