Elena Boeck
Elena N. Boeck (Ph.D., Yale) is Professor of History of Art at DePaul University and specializes in the arts of the medieval Mediterranean world. A native of Riga, Latvia, she traces her ancestral origins to Romania and Russia. Her publications explore intellectual exchange in the Mediterranean and unconventional, fascinating forms of engagement with Byzantium's legacy. Her current book project, The Legend of Troy in the Middle Ages: Imagining Migration as Regeneration, focuses on intellectual and visual construction of Troy in the medieval imagination. This book is the first comparative, cross-cultural exploration of this subject across western medieval and eastern Christian cultural communities.
Her first book, Imagining the Byzantine Past: The Perception of History in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses (Cambridge University Press 2015; paperback edition 2018) investigated the rise of illustrated histories in the Mediterranean world from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries and explores the ideological motivations for visualizing Byzantine history in Sicily and Bulgaria. The second book, The Bronze Horseman of Justinian in Constantinople: The Cross-Cultural Biography of a Mediterranean Monument (Cambridge University Press, 2021), was the first interdisciplinary study of the medieval Mediterranean's most cross-culturally significant sculptural monument. The monument's reach was as wide as possible for any stationary object. Its maximum discursive range stretched roughly 3000 km to the west, more than 2000 km to the north, and roughly 2000 km to the east. Most recently, she edited Afterlives of Byzantine Monuments in Post-Byzantine Times (Heidelberg: Herlo Verlag UG, 2021), which focuses on selective, strategic and self-conscious engagement with Byzantium. Her other research interests include icons of the Three-Handed Mother of God, the rediscovery of Byzantium in the nineteenth century, and Muscovite devotional images influenced by counter-Reformation print culture.
She held appointments as the the Advanced Academia Programme Fellow at Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia, Excellence Initiative Professor at Radboud University, Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and as consulting curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her first book, Imagining the Byzantine Past: The Perception of History in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses (Cambridge University Press 2015; paperback edition 2018) investigated the rise of illustrated histories in the Mediterranean world from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries and explores the ideological motivations for visualizing Byzantine history in Sicily and Bulgaria. The second book, The Bronze Horseman of Justinian in Constantinople: The Cross-Cultural Biography of a Mediterranean Monument (Cambridge University Press, 2021), was the first interdisciplinary study of the medieval Mediterranean's most cross-culturally significant sculptural monument. The monument's reach was as wide as possible for any stationary object. Its maximum discursive range stretched roughly 3000 km to the west, more than 2000 km to the north, and roughly 2000 km to the east. Most recently, she edited Afterlives of Byzantine Monuments in Post-Byzantine Times (Heidelberg: Herlo Verlag UG, 2021), which focuses on selective, strategic and self-conscious engagement with Byzantium. Her other research interests include icons of the Three-Handed Mother of God, the rediscovery of Byzantium in the nineteenth century, and Muscovite devotional images influenced by counter-Reformation print culture.
She held appointments as the the Advanced Academia Programme Fellow at Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia, Excellence Initiative Professor at Radboud University, Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and as consulting curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Manteqna's antiquarian relocation of Constantinople's greatest imperial monument to Rome brought Manuel Chrysoloras's ideas full circle. Chrysoloras elevated monuments of the past as worthy evidence. Cyriac of Ancona made them worthy of admiration, demonstrating their value to antiquarian pursuits and alerting scholars to the enormous importance of visual and epigraphic evidence. After the fall of Constantinople, the lost monument was granted new life in intellectual spaces between the real and the imagined, the antiquarian and the allegorical. It took Andrea Mantegna to give this lost monument a place in history. Taking the greatest and most cross-culturally significant Byzantine sculptural monument, he projected it back into the past of Rome and into a vision of Roman and Western history cherished by antiquarians.
The image of Theodora perpetuated by Sardou would become firmly ensconced in the popular imagination, despite the best efforts of his critics. Sardou, Sarah Bernhardt, and their sumptuous Byzantine spectacle created a long-lasting impression upon the popular and academic imagination. Rather than scorn Sardou's play for its warped vision of Byzantium, Byzantinists should embrace it as a didactic example for probing how we, too, frame, claim, and re-frame Byzantium based on our own fashions, scholarly preoccupations, and shifting paradigms. Sardou serves as a useful reminder that, ultimately, we all create our own vision of Byzantium and we all get the Theodora we deserve.
The concept of 'post-Byzantine' is a far more complicated construct that the concept of Byzantium's 'afterlives'. Is 'Post-Byzantine' a period or a process? Is it one preeminent act of political extinction (1453) or a series of interconnected moments unfolding in different places, at different speeds, with differing intellectual valences? Can one concept simultaneously encompass both aggressive appropriations of the Byzantine legacy and protective, defensive invocations of it? Even if we can agree on when Byzantium was consigned to the past, we still have to find nuanced ways of analyzing how Byzantium became consigned to the past.
Employing approaches developed in narrative theory and insights derived from studies of translation and adaptation, this article analyzes how the visual narrative selectively 'foregrounds' the bloody drama of the demise of emperor Leo V at the hands of his challenger Michael the Amorian. In this dialogic adaptation, an episode of Byzantine history was creatively restaged for visual display to a Sicilian audience. Produced in a place that was conversant in Byzantine culture, yet not bound by its political, ideological or representational constraints, the visual narrative navigates a novel third way between the Byzantine text and the manuscript's Sicilian context.
The unusual icon represents Constantinople as both a visionary Orthodox ideal and as a physical, imperial city. The city is signified by an architectural pairing - the elaborate church of Hagia Sophia abutted by the sculpture of Justinian's horseman atop its tall column. For centuries this pairing was the foremost marvel of the city. The representation on the icon also accurately reflects the historical topography of Byzantine Constantinople - the two monuments stood in close proximity to each other. A unique representation of a buttress, shown in the upper left quadrant of the icon, supporting the dome of Hagia Sophia, commemorates the Russian contribution to the restoration of the Great Church during the Palaiologan period. Because Justinian's horseman was removed shortly after 1453, the icon also offers a timeless vision. Hagia Sophia and the column of Justinian are material embodiments of Tsar'grad, the imperial city. By anchoring the celebration of the cross in Constantinople, the icon creates a time-bending, transhistorical loop of commemoration.
It also makes space for both Byzantine and Muscovite historical actors. The icon diachronically envisions the Constantinopolitan roots of the feast of the Elevation of the Cross and depicts their liturgical flowering in Muscovy. It creates a political-ecclesiastical bridge between the Orthodox empire of the past and its successor. By constructing the image of Constantinople as it was before the city's fall to the Ottomans, the icon insists on an unsullied transfer of the Orthodox empire to the lands of Rus'. As such, it embodies a Russian view of Orthodox history, presenting translatio imperii by selectively engaging with the Byzantine past.
Manteqna's antiquarian relocation of Constantinople's greatest imperial monument to Rome brought Manuel Chrysoloras's ideas full circle. Chrysoloras elevated monuments of the past as worthy evidence. Cyriac of Ancona made them worthy of admiration, demonstrating their value to antiquarian pursuits and alerting scholars to the enormous importance of visual and epigraphic evidence. After the fall of Constantinople, the lost monument was granted new life in intellectual spaces between the real and the imagined, the antiquarian and the allegorical. It took Andrea Mantegna to give this lost monument a place in history. Taking the greatest and most cross-culturally significant Byzantine sculptural monument, he projected it back into the past of Rome and into a vision of Roman and Western history cherished by antiquarians.
The image of Theodora perpetuated by Sardou would become firmly ensconced in the popular imagination, despite the best efforts of his critics. Sardou, Sarah Bernhardt, and their sumptuous Byzantine spectacle created a long-lasting impression upon the popular and academic imagination. Rather than scorn Sardou's play for its warped vision of Byzantium, Byzantinists should embrace it as a didactic example for probing how we, too, frame, claim, and re-frame Byzantium based on our own fashions, scholarly preoccupations, and shifting paradigms. Sardou serves as a useful reminder that, ultimately, we all create our own vision of Byzantium and we all get the Theodora we deserve.
The concept of 'post-Byzantine' is a far more complicated construct that the concept of Byzantium's 'afterlives'. Is 'Post-Byzantine' a period or a process? Is it one preeminent act of political extinction (1453) or a series of interconnected moments unfolding in different places, at different speeds, with differing intellectual valences? Can one concept simultaneously encompass both aggressive appropriations of the Byzantine legacy and protective, defensive invocations of it? Even if we can agree on when Byzantium was consigned to the past, we still have to find nuanced ways of analyzing how Byzantium became consigned to the past.
Employing approaches developed in narrative theory and insights derived from studies of translation and adaptation, this article analyzes how the visual narrative selectively 'foregrounds' the bloody drama of the demise of emperor Leo V at the hands of his challenger Michael the Amorian. In this dialogic adaptation, an episode of Byzantine history was creatively restaged for visual display to a Sicilian audience. Produced in a place that was conversant in Byzantine culture, yet not bound by its political, ideological or representational constraints, the visual narrative navigates a novel third way between the Byzantine text and the manuscript's Sicilian context.
The unusual icon represents Constantinople as both a visionary Orthodox ideal and as a physical, imperial city. The city is signified by an architectural pairing - the elaborate church of Hagia Sophia abutted by the sculpture of Justinian's horseman atop its tall column. For centuries this pairing was the foremost marvel of the city. The representation on the icon also accurately reflects the historical topography of Byzantine Constantinople - the two monuments stood in close proximity to each other. A unique representation of a buttress, shown in the upper left quadrant of the icon, supporting the dome of Hagia Sophia, commemorates the Russian contribution to the restoration of the Great Church during the Palaiologan period. Because Justinian's horseman was removed shortly after 1453, the icon also offers a timeless vision. Hagia Sophia and the column of Justinian are material embodiments of Tsar'grad, the imperial city. By anchoring the celebration of the cross in Constantinople, the icon creates a time-bending, transhistorical loop of commemoration.
It also makes space for both Byzantine and Muscovite historical actors. The icon diachronically envisions the Constantinopolitan roots of the feast of the Elevation of the Cross and depicts their liturgical flowering in Muscovy. It creates a political-ecclesiastical bridge between the Orthodox empire of the past and its successor. By constructing the image of Constantinople as it was before the city's fall to the Ottomans, the icon insists on an unsullied transfer of the Orthodox empire to the lands of Rus'. As such, it embodies a Russian view of Orthodox history, presenting translatio imperii by selectively engaging with the Byzantine past.
This article also establishes that Peter assumed the appellation "Great" already in 1717, as opposed to the previously documented first use of the appellation dating to his imperial coronation in 1721.
Rachel Bryant Davies creates a deeply engaging, multifaceted and textured analysis of reception in nineteenth-century Britain through the prisms of Troy (the majority of the book) and Carthage (a limited case study, set up as antithesis to Troy). She calls these “paradigmatic ruined cities” (17) and argues that “…there was a wider, more complex circulation of knowledge about the Classics, among more socially varied spectators, than has previously been supposed.” (140). Bryant Davies ambitiously traces transformations of Troy in cultural imagination (primarily through Homer), explores its identification with defined physical places (finalized by Schliemann), and assigns it a prominent place in nineteenth-century popular culture through “the transfer of classical knowledge” (127).
Though the book makes a strong contribution to reception studies, analysis of cultural discourse in nineteenth-century Britain, and the history of popular culture, a few of its grander claims stem from modernist myopia and cannot be fully endorsed. According to Bryant Davies “This tradition of looking to the destruction of earlier cities to predict future destruction was most strikingly adopted within the nineteenth-century British cultural imagination.” (23). The fascination with Troy as a barometer for the ebbs and flows of history was not limited to nineteenth-century British audiences. Nor were the British the only Europeans to use the historical example of Troy to speak to their own anxieties and historical moment. A reader of this book would not be able to discern that the Trojan narrative was sensationally popular in both the literary and visual cultures of the medieval and early modern periods. From Madrid to Moscow for centuries Troy and its tragic heroes served as exempla of audacious ambition, ingenious savagery, reversals of fortune, convulsions of civilizations, and foundational moments and movements in history.
11.10 Panel I
Charles Barber (Princeton University)
Theophanes of Nicaea on the icon of the Transfiguration
Ágnes Kriza (University of Cologne)
The “eleventh-century watershed” in Byzantine art and the beginnings of apse decoration in medieval Rus’
Elena Boeck (DePaul University, Chicago)
From Pillar of Empire to Ghost Rider in the Sky: Russian responses to Justinian's Bronze Horseman between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
12.40 Lunch Break
14.10 Panel II
Brian Boeck (DePaul University, Chicago)
Crisis of Confidence: Explaining why Ivan the Terrible's enormous Illuminated Chronicle Compilation was never finished
Ovidiu Olar (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
The Missing Link: Seventeenth-century Moldavian and Wallachian manuscripts between Slavia Orthodoxa and the Greek-speaking Christianity
Aleksandr Lavrov (Université Paris-Sorbonne)
Die Gläubigen der Bistümer Vologda und Velikij Ustjug und der plötzliche Tod (vnezapnaja smert’) im siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhundert
15.40 Coffee Break
16.00 Panel III
Cornelia Soldat (University of Cologne)
Type and Prototype – or: how to become the Chosen People
Justin Willson (Princeton University)
Seeing Nimbi in the fourteenth century in Byzantium
Christoph Witzenrath (University of Bonn)
Sari Saltuk and St. Nicholas between the Ottomans and Muscovy
Nataliia Sinkevych (University of Tübingen)
The cult of saints in early modern Ukrainian society
Conveners: Ágnes Kriza & Cornelia Soldat
Email: agnes.kriza@uni-koeln.de
For more information:
http://www.slavistik.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/2306.html
In Orthodox liturgical tradition, the feast commemorating the defeat of Byzantine Iconoclasm (726-843) is called Triumph of Orthodoxy, the victory of true faith: it celebrates icons and icon veneration as symbols of Orthodoxy. What were the implications of this identification between icons and Orthodoxy for medieval Russian culture? How did this idea influence sacred imagery itself? What role did icons play in the formation of religious identity of Muscovy? This panel seeks to explore the significance of icons beyond art history, as manifestations and expression of faith in Muscovite period by investigating four texts of medieval Russian theological literature; by analyzing sixteenth-century visualizations of Byzantine Iconoclasm and by discovering a seventeenth-century illuminated compendium of Marian miracles.
Chair: Daniel B. Rowland, U of Kentucky
Papers:
David Maurice Goldfrank, Georgetown U: "Now You See Them, Now You Don’t: Four Windows into Images and Orthodox Identity in Early Rus’ and Muscovy"
Agnes Kriza, U of Cologne: "Icon, Orthodoxy, and Empire: Representations of Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Ivan the Terrible"
Elena Boeck, DePaul U: "Defending Orthodoxy in Muscovy with Catholic Geography: Russian Scribes and the Internationalization of the Mother of God"
Disc.: Michael S. Flier, Harvard U
Responder: Gil Fishhof