| Canopies: The Framing of Sacred Space in the Byzantine Ecclesiastical Tradition re-examines the role of the canopy as a basic symbolic and spatial unit in the Byzantine church. The central focus and dominant vertical axis that the canopy provides within liturgical rites is expanded by the directional ambivalence, which offers an innovative understanding of the materialization of the idea of the Byzantine church and its multi-focal spatial iconography. The micro-architecture of canopies reveals modular and additive qualities of the church, from its structural four-columned core with a dome, through actual four- and two-columned furnishings above altar tables, baptismal and holy water fonts, ambos, tombs, and specially venerated (proskynetaria ) icons, to liturgical vestments and vessels in the shape of a canopy, and finally to two-dimensional canopies represented on church floors and walls. Although formulaic in execution, perhaps even because of their generic imagery and decoration, canopies were adaptable to different specific contexts. This study suggests that the canopy-frame was a subtle boundary between the sacred and the worldly, and yet, at the same time, it was totally integrated as a symbolic unit with the presence of God beyond space and time.; Part One, The Canopy and the Byzantine Church, deals with the catalogued archaeological evidence for more than 150 canopies, complemented by 400 visual representations of and 100 texts about canopies. The material reveals how by intermingling rhetorical images and visual embodiments of the idea of a canopy, the Byzantines used inconsistent descriptive terminology: ciborium/kiborion, pirgos, oikiskos, orophion, apsida, tetrakionos, tetrapylon, tetravelon, katapetasma, parapetasma, pepla, koubukleion. The problem has deepened owing to the antiquarian origins of Byzantine studies in the sixteenth century, which witnessed a marginalization of terms other than ciborium, resulting in lacunae in current scholarship on canopies. Material evidence further supports the observation that there were many more canopies in Byzantine churches than previously thought. Indeed, the size, material and artistic quality of canopies changed especially after the Iconoclasm and the loss of Imperial control of their production. The formulation of concepts related to the framing of sacred space by canopies, however, is tied to the Iconoclasm and to polemics about the Incarnation in Jerusalem and Constantinople. By the fifteenth century canopies received additional, often anachronistic and conflating explanations, diverging from material evidence.; By raising questions about places of individual or collective encounter with the sacred, Part Two, The Canopy and the Human Body, reveals the human body and divine grace to be integrated vehicles of "Byzantine humanism," that went beyond humanist notions of the sixteenth century. Religious, funerary, imperial and civic canopies are juxtaposed with altar and ambo canopies, canopied saints' tombs and shrines within the church, and are compared to the Tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, the seminal building for the testimony of the New Covenant. Examined within Byzantine Christianity and its historical continuity with the Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic past, special case studies include canopies from Hagia Sophia, St. Polyeuktos and St. Euphemia in Constantinople, Panagia Ekatontapyliani on Paros, the church of the Assumption of the Virgin in Kalabaka, St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki and Blessed Loukas in Boeotia. The role of the human and liturgical body for understanding Byzantine canopies is further exemplified by the study of the tent-like Major Sakkos of Photios, which explains the Byzantine Christological concept of the moving canopy as a "living icon." The Marian concept "Ark-Virgin-Church" is addressed in the Epilogue, which outlines the phenomenon of canopies as essential architectural and ontological constructs in the Byzantine church. |
