Bøger af Vladimir Ivanovici

This book argues that Romans credited certain living persons with the capacity to function as cult statues, that is, as images and vessels of the divine. After addressing the cultural context that produced the idea that humans can become images of the divine, the text shows how emperors, bishops, and others imitated the aesthetic, immobility, and material setting of statuary to establish themselves as iconic and how their role as mediators with the divine was eventually transferred to new categories of material objects, such as relics and icons. The figure of the iconic person thus is shown to have bridged the cult statues of Antiquity with the new mechanisms of interaction with the divine that Christians used for the following millennium. By integrating living persons in the art historical analysis of the spaces and advocating for the need to consider the animation of artefacts together with the reification of bodies, this study marks an important development in the study of the past.

Using light as fil rouge reuniting theology and ritual with the architecture, decoration, and iconography of cultic spaces, the present study argues that the mise-en-scene of fifth-century baptism and sixth-century episcopal liturgy was meant to reproduce the luminous atmosphere of heaven. Analysing the material culture of the two sacraments against common ritual expectations and Christian theology, we evince the mannerin which the luminous effect was reached through a combination of constructive techniques and perceptual manipulation. One nocturnal and one diurnal, the two ceremonials represented different scenarios, testifying to the capacity of church builders and willingness of Late Antique bishops to stage the ritual experience in order to offer God to the senses.