scholarly journals Eastern or Western - that is the Question. Some Notes on the New Evidence concerning the Eastern Origin of the Halberstadt Diptych

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 193-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gudrun Bühl

The Halberstadt diptych is a prominent example of late-antique official court art and of various kinds of expression of legitimation and power. In an article written in 1998, Alan Cameron attributed the diptych to Consul F1. Constans of 414, contradicting those who judged ita s having been commissioned by the western consul Fl. Constantius, who became consul only three years later. What may seem like a negligible difference in years is of significant consequence in that Cameron’s suggestion not only assigns the diptych a new date but, more importantly, postulates an eastern origin for it and raises wider questions in the history of art. In the following paper Cameron’s main argument will be refuted, while other arguments will be rehabilitated in favour of a western origin of the Halberstadt diptych. 

1970 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
Brilliant Richares

This essay attempts to disqualify the date of 410, when Alaric sacked Rome, as a significant event in the history of art. It forms part of a much longer investigation of periodicity and its boundaries, especially with the respect to the nature of Late Antique art, ambivalently at the end of an artistic tradition and at the beginning of another.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-267
Author(s):  
Kuniichi Uno

For Gilles Deleuze's two essays ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’ and ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’, the crucial question is what the perception is, what its fundamental conditions are. A desert island can be a place to experiment on this question. The types of perception are described in many critical works about the history of art and aesthetical reflections by artists. So I will try to retrace some types of perception especially linked to the ‘haptic’, the importance of which was rediscovered by Deleuze. The ‘haptic’ proposes a type of perception not linked to space, but to time in its aspects of genesis. And something incorporeal has to intervene in a very original stage of perception and of perception of time. Thus we will be able to capture some links between the fundamental aspects of perception and time in its ‘out of joint’ aspects (Aion).


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-308
Author(s):  
James A. Francis

The Defense of Holy Images by John of Damascus stands as the archetypal exposition of the Christian theology of images. Written at the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy, it has been mostly valued for its theological content and given scholarly short shrift as a narrowly focused polemic. The work is more than that. It presents a complex and profound explication of the nature of images and the phenomenon of representation, and is an important part of the “history of looking”in western culture. A long chain of visual conceptions connects classical Greek and Roman writers, such as Homer and Quintilian, to John: the living image, the interrelation of word and image, and image and memory, themes elaborated particularly in the Second Sophistic period of the early Common Era. For John to deploy this heritage so skillfully to the thorny problem of the place of images in Christianity, at the outbreak of a violent conflict that lasted a further 100 years after his writing, manifests an intellect and creativity that has not been sufficiently appreciated. The Defense of Holy Images, understood in this context, is another innovative synthesis of Christianity and classical culture produced by late antique Christian writers.


Author(s):  
Jack Tannous

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.


Author(s):  
S. V. Ushakov

Hundreds of scientific works are devoted to the study of the Tauric Chersonesus, but the problem of chronology and periodization of its ancient history is not sufficiently developed in historiography. Analysis of scientific literature and a number of sources concerning this subject allows to define the chronological framework and to reveal 10 stages of the history of ancient Chersonesos (as a preliminary definition). The early stage, the Foundation and formation of the Polis, is defined from the middle/last third of the VI century (or the first half of the V century BC) to the end of the V century BC. The end of the late-Antique − early-Byzantine (transitional) time in Chersonesos can be attributed to the second half of the VI – first third of the VII centuries ad).


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