The Other Dimension. Deat and Afterlife in Christian Art

Author(s):  
Valentin Golubev
Keyword(s):  
1949 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 26-71
Author(s):  
J. B. Ward Perkins

It is one of the saddest losses of history that of Antioch and Alexandria, two of the great early centres of Christian art and learning, hardly a stone should now be standing above ground. Of the two, Alexandria is in the worse case. Antioch can at least boast the magnificent series of mosaics unearthed before the war by the Princeton Expedition. At Alexandria on the other hand there is little chance that excavation can ever reveal any substantial remains of the classical city, which was ruthlessly destroyed in the last century to make way for the expansion of its modern successor; and whereas in the case of the minor arts the contribution of Alexandria to the contemporary art of the Mediterranean, whether in its relation to the Byzantine world or to the nascent Coptic art of Upper Egypt, can at least be usefully discussed in the light of surviving ivories, textiles, manuscript illustrations, and the like, in the field of architecture and of architectural ornament any such enquiry is hampered by a vacuum at the heart of the problem. The questions so well defined by Kitzinger in regard to Coptic sculpture are capable of wider application.


2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 78-138
Author(s):  
Nancy Davenport

AbstractThe text seeks to integrate the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art of the traditional Benedictine community of Beuron in southwestern Germany with early twentieth-century Modernist aesthetics, particularly as the latter are expressed in Abstraction and Empathy, a Contribution to the Psychology of Style by the German Art Historian Wilhelm Worringer. The influences on Beuron art—the German Kulturkampf that set Protestants and Catholics in northern and southern Germany in opposition and placed the few remaining monastic communities in limbo, the Beuron artist monks’ inspiration from the immobile Egyptian antiquities in the museums of Munich and Berlin, and their desire to develop a universal and otherworldly Christian art which transcended the tangible, tactile, and divisive world in which they lived, worked, and prayed—resulted in a similar rejection of the visible, the real, and the tangible and an embrace of the eternal and symbolic that the Modernists sought. The text ends with a quote from the Dutch Modernist Jan Toorop, a recently converted Roman Catholic, who asked his audience the following in 1912: “Two sculptures that dominate today in the mainstream of sculpture are The Burghers of Calais by the great Rodin and on the other hand St. Benedictine and St. Scholastica by the Benedictine Father Desiderius Lenz. Where do you want to go: to Rodin or to Lenz? To Calais or to Monte Cassino near Rome? Take a look at the work and we’ll talk again?” The question asked by Toorop is the question interrogated in this text.


Zograf ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 101-125
Author(s):  
Milos Zivkovic

The first part of the paper discusses the written testimonies about the history of the cult of the holy fathers of Sinai and Raithou at St. Catherine?s monastery and the visual representations of these saints in East Christian art. The Sinai icons in question are then analysed in two ways. First, the choice of figures of the saints in the upper registers of the icons is considered. On the other hand, the iconography of the forty Sinai and Raithou martyrs is studied in greater detail. It is shown that representations of the celebrated holy monks were used to paint their ?portraits?.


The chapter discusses a group of works by Berlinde De Bruyckere. Recurring themes in her work are the fragility and mortality of the human body. Jelle Luipaardand Hanne include references to religious iconography, but the motifs are strongly modified. These interrupted resemblances to religious art address not only the history of Christian art, but also a set of deeper questions concerning the functioning of the image and its presentation in different contexts. The figurative power of morbid, vulnerable figures coexists with an interest in making visible the very operations of producing the sculptures. Jelle Luipaard critically addresses the violence in religious iconography because it displaces a central religious image (the crucifixion) we are used to seeing and repeats its violence in order to confront its viewer with its logic. In this way the work acquires a critical agency without being a scandalous image from a religious viewpoint. On the other hand, it addresses our desire to make images safe by deeming them as art. The sculpture does not represent death as a reminder of our mortality, but addresses the very issue of its figuration in an art context.


1970 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
Hans-Rudolf Meier

In the context of Imperial Art as Christian Art, a question of special interest is how Christian emperors handled the imperial legacy of their pagan predecessors. That the tradition of the saecula aurea was important at least for the first Christian emperor is shown by the Arch of Constantine. The extensive use of spolia became one of the characteristics of the architecture of Constantine and his followers. But this handling of the past is also a sign of its fragmentation and selection, and mirrors in some way the emperor’s policy: on the one hand they tried to protect the main temples and their statues as works of art and bearers of the glorious tradition of the empire, on the other hand, they took assertive actions against paganism. A critical comparison between imperial decrees, other texts of Late Antiquity and the archeological evidence shows the different genres of the artistic legacy between destruction as relics of paganism and integration into the Christian empire.


1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (03) ◽  
pp. 411-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin W. Stearn

Stromatoporoids are the principal framebuilding organisms in the patch reef that is part of the reservoir of the Normandville field. The reef is 10 m thick and 1.5 km2in area and demonstrates that stromatoporoids retained their ability to build reefal edifices into Famennian time despite the biotic crisis at the close of Frasnian time. The fauna is dominated by labechiids but includes three non-labechiid species. The most abundant species isStylostroma sinense(Dong) butLabechia palliseriStearn is also common. Both these species are highly variable and are described in terms of multiple phases that occur in a single skeleton. The other species described areClathrostromacf.C. jukkenseYavorsky,Gerronostromasp. (a columnar species), andStromatoporasp. The fauna belongs in Famennian/Strunian assemblage 2 as defined by Stearn et al. (1988).


1967 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 207-244
Author(s):  
R. P. Kraft

(Ed. note:Encouraged by the success of the more informal approach in Christy's presentation, we tried an even more extreme experiment in this session, I-D. In essence, Kraft held the floor continuously all morning, and for the hour and a half afternoon session, serving as a combined Summary-Introductory speaker and a marathon-moderator of a running discussion on the line spectrum of cepheids. There was almost continuous interruption of his presentation; and most points raised from the floor were followed through in detail, no matter how digressive to the main presentation. This approach turned out to be much too extreme. It is wearing on the speaker, and the other members of the symposium feel more like an audience and less like participants in a dissective discussion. Because Kraft presented a compendious collection of empirical information, and, based on it, an exceedingly novel series of suggestions on the cepheid problem, these defects were probably aggravated by the first and alleviated by the second. I am much indebted to Kraft for working with me on a preliminary editing, to try to delete the side-excursions and to retain coherence about the main points. As usual, however, all responsibility for defects in final editing is wholly my own.)


1967 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 177-206
Author(s):  
J. B. Oke ◽  
C. A. Whitney

Pecker:The topic to be considered today is the continuous spectrum of certain stars, whose variability we attribute to a pulsation of some part of their structure. Obviously, this continuous spectrum provides a test of the pulsation theory to the extent that the continuum is completely and accurately observed and that we can analyse it to infer the structure of the star producing it. The continuum is one of the two possible spectral observations; the other is the line spectrum. It is obvious that from studies of the continuum alone, we obtain no direct information on the velocity fields in the star. We obtain information only on the thermodynamic structure of the photospheric layers of these stars–the photospheric layers being defined as those from which the observed continuum directly arises. So the problems arising in a study of the continuum are of two general kinds: completeness of observation, and adequacy of diagnostic interpretation. I will make a few comments on these, then turn the meeting over to Oke and Whitney.


1966 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 337
Author(s):  
W. Iwanowska

A new 24-inch/36-inch//3 Schmidt telescope, made by C. Zeiss, Jena, has been installed since 30 August 1962, at the N. Copernicus University Observatory in Toruń. It is equipped with two objective prisms, used separately, one of crown the other of flint glass, each of 5° refracting angle, giving dispersions of 560Å/mm and 250Å/ mm respectively.


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