Icon with the Crucifixion (Detail, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Art historian Roland Betancourt illuminates the central role of images in Byzantine culture, paying close attention to how basic questions about images and their power in the medieval world can inform the ways in which we think about images today. Covering the crucial years of the Byzantine Empire (roughly 330–1453), Betancourt looks at the art, architecture, and theories of visual culture in the medieval lands of the eastern Mediterranean, encompassing places such as Sicily, Venice, North Africa, the Levant, and the Balkans, and in modern-day Türkiye, Greece, Syria, and Russia.
Betancourt is a professor in the art history department at the University of California, Irvine, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2023. He specializes in Byzantium and in the intersection of art, culture, and technology.
August 17 The Rise of Icons and Iconoclasm
Explore the development and rise of early Christian art, including iconoclasts’ questions about the ability to represent God through images and the debates this problem sparked across the Byzantine Empire.
August 24 Byzantine Art and the Senses
Delve into Byzantine art after the resolution of iconoclasm, an evolution that focused on the sensory experience of images, architecture, and liturgy.
August 31 Art and Representation: Sexuality, Gender, and Race
Examine representations of difference in appearance and expression of gender and race in the Byzantine Empire.
3 sessions
General Information
