Visions, Intercessions, and the Mediation of Divine Presence in Byzantium, lecture by Armin Bergmeier (Leipzig University), Boğaziçi University, September 19, 2019, 5:00 pm

The earliest Cristian art managed without any depictions of the new religion’s divinity, instead mainly depicting the human Jesus and allegorical images. Only towards the mid-to- late fourth century did a desire for depictions of the Christian God (“Visionserwartung”) manifest itself in the visual culture. Image-makers succeeded in circumventing the prohibition of material and lasting divine images inherited from Judaism by creating images of temporary, immaterial visions. These theophanic images, brief glimpses of the divine, were immensely successful. However, in the century leading up to the period of Iconoclasm, they were slowly marginalized and transformed. When the image-production finally increased again in the ninth century and theophanic images reappeared they were much less prominent, and their iconography had been noticeably changed. This talk will link these iconographical changes and the marginalization of theophanic images to dramatic changes in the religiosity and to iconophile ideology at the time.

Armin Bergmeier is an art historian of Late Antique, Byzantine, and Western medieval art with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean and Italy. Since 2016, he has been assistant professor of art history at the University of Leipzig, where he teaches courses on Late Antique, Byzantine, and Islamic art and architecture. His work explores changes and transformations across cultures, questions of the presence of art works and architecture, and the Byzantine artistic heritage in Venice. He is currently an A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Boğaziçi University’s Byzantine Studies Research Center, where he has been working on his second book project, entitled “Manipulating History in Venice and the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1150–1300).”