Refiguring the Face of God

📖 The Scoop

The mosaics of the monastery church at Daphni are among the best known programmes of Byzantine church decoration and are counted among the supreme achievements in that medium. The Pantokrator, the image of Christ in the dome, is often taken as the iconic expression of the Orthodox deity, watchful and even threatening. Yet if the mosaics are well known they are not known well. Although some are occasionally described as "restored" following a series of earthquakes in the 1880s and 1890s, the occasion, nature and results of their transformation are little recognized. The Pantokrator and the prophets below him are effectively reconstructions, and have been modified again after further damage in earthquakes in 1981 and 1999. Based on direct study from the scaffold and unpublished photographs, drawings and textual accounts of the late nineteenth century, this book describes the state of the mosaics in the dome, the drum and elsewhere and draws on contemporary newspaper reports and archival material to document the long and agonized attempts of the Christian Archaeological Society of Athens to have the church repaired and the mosaics returned to their original state. Special attention is paid to the work of the otherwise unknown Venetian Francesco Novo, to his place within the larger history of mosaic restoration, and to the political and economic circumstances surrounding the repairs. The reactions of Greeks who witnessed them and of intellectuals who soon forgot the late nineteenth-century interventions are considered, as well as the impact of this erasure upon interpretations of the Pantokrator offered by the Orthodox public and a world-wide audience of scholars.

Genre: Architecture / History / Medieval (fancy, right?)