Vasileios Marinis

Asterius of Amaseia's Ekphrasis on the Holy Martyr Euphemia focuses on a set of paintings depicting the martyrdom of the local saint that the author purportedly saw when he was in residence in Chalcedon. This article offers a new reading of the Ekphrasis, concentrating on two neglected but significant aspects: its place as an answer to the anguished deliberations of Church Fathers over the importance of classical paideia in Christianity, and the text's implicit yet clear stance that the written and spoken word can compete with and indeed surpass works of art of the same subject. Following the rules of the genre outlined in the rhetorical manuals while telling the story of a Christian martyr, the Ekphrasis demonstrates how an educated person (pepaideumenos) can employ his education in the service of the new, Christian message, and can even argue for its superiority over pagan traditions. Concomitantly, the Ekphrasis reinforces the notion that the word is superior to art because only an educated speaker or author can adequately interpret a work of art and dictate the proper ways of viewing and responding to it.

The Last Judgment, the extraordinary conclusion to Christ's parousia, played a consequential role in Byzantine religious culture. However, the scarcity of biblical information and the lack of an official council-sanctioned theology of the afterlife resulted in the creation of varying and sometimes contradictory narratives. The most systematic treatment of questions pertaining to the Last Judgment is by Joseph Bryennios (d. c. 1430/1), a theologian and court preacher, in a series of two sermons. This paper offers a detailed investigation of Bryennios' eschatological thought and discusses its sources and its importance as 'official' theology in the last decades of the empire.

This paper offers a close reading of the passages in the Historia Ekkle-siastike kai Mystike Theoria, a liturgical commentary attributed to Germanos I, patriarch of Constantinople (d. 730), that pertain to the church building. The His-toria's interpretation is highly symbolic, steeped in scripture and dependent on earlier and contemporary theological thought. On occasion, the text sheds light on actual architectural developments, as in the case of the skeuophylakion. On the whole, however, the discussion of architecture is rather vague. I argue that the Historia is part of a long exegetical tradition on the liturgy that disregards the functional aspects of church buildings, a disconnect enabled by the adaptability of Byzantine liturgical rites.

Abstract: This article examines the most complete example of an early Christian tunic decorated with New Testament scenes. The iconography includes, among others, the Adoration of the Magi, Nativity, Baptism, Christ and the Samaritan Woman, along with ...