About the lecture:
The Middle Byzantine architectural resurgence in Attica and the Peloponnese corresponds to the period of prosperity following the Byzantine defeat of the Arabs in 961, and the subsequent military interventions in the Balkans by Basil II, who celebrated a triumph in Athens in 1018. Hundreds of churches survive across the region – more than two dozen in Athens alone – many of them small and domed and distinctive in their architectural style. Gabriel Millet offered an important assessment of their stylistic features and construction techniques in his dissertation, L’école grecque dans l’architecture byzantine, published in 1916, situating them in contrast to those of Constantinople. The talk will examine several characteristic aspects of Helladic architecture and ask if we might view these within a broader geographical perspective, as participants in the “global" Middle Ages.
About the speaker:
Robert G. Ousterhout is Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of Visualizing Community: Art, Material Culture, and Settlement in Byzantine Cappadocia, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 46 (Washington, DC, 2017); and Eastern Medieval Architecture: The Building Traditions of Byzantium and Neighboring Lands, (Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture: Oxford University Press, 2019), as well as co-editor of Piroska and the Pantokrator, with M. Sághy (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019); and The Holy Apostles: A Lost Monument, a Forgotten Project, and the Presentness of the Past, with M. Mullett, Dumbarton Oaks Symposia and Colloquia (Washington, DC, 2020).
His fieldwork has concentrated on Byzantine architecture, monumental art, and urbanism in Constantinople, Thrace, Cappadocia, and Jerusalem. Since 2011 he has co-directed the “Cappadocia in Context” graduate seminar, an international summer field school for Koç University. He was awarded the 2021 Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy of America for Eastern Medieval Architecture.
