Visualizing Community

Name: Visualizing Community
Brand: Unknown
SKU: 9780884024132
Price: 226.0 NZD
Availability: InStock

Art, Material Culture, and Settlement in Byzantine Cappadocia

By Robert G. Ousterhout

Series: Dumbarton Oaks Studies

0.0 (0 reviews)

Summary

Visualizing Community explores Cappadocia, a volcanic region in central Anatolia, famed for its rich Byzantine material culture. Robert G. Ousterhout examines extensive rock-cut churches, monasteries, dwellings, and other architectural features alongside their painted decorations to reinterpret the area's historical and spiritual landscape. With scarce textual records, the book relies on material and visual evidence to bring to life the communities that shaped this remarkable region.
Read More

Format: Hardback

$226⁰⁰

AVAILABLE WITH SUPPLIER Ships from our Auckland warehouse within 3-4 weeks

Found a better price? Request a price match

Visualizing Community

$226⁰⁰

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book will appeal to readers interested in Byzantine history, archaeology, art history, and architectural studies, especially those fascinated by underexplored regions where visual culture holds the key to understanding the past.

Cappadocia is unrivaled in its preservation of the physical remains of the Byzantine Empire: churches, towns and villages, agricultural installations, storage facilities, and other examples of non-ecclesiastical architecture. Visualizing Community offers a critical reassessment of the historiography of Byzantine Cappadocia.

Description

Cappadocia, a picturesque volcanic region of central Anatolia, preserves the best evidence of daily life in the Byzantine Empire and yet remains remarkably understudied, better known to tourists than to scholars. The area preserves an abundance of physical remains: at least a thousand rock-cut churches or chapels, of which more than one-third retain significant elements of their painted decoration, as well as monasteries, houses, entire towns and villages, underground refuges, agricultural installations, storage facilities, hydrological interventions, and countless other examples of non-ecclesiastical architecture. In dramatic contrast to its dearth of textual evidence, Cappadocia is unrivaled in the Byzantine world for its material culture.

Based upon the close analysis of material and visual residues, Visualizing Community offers a critical reassessment of the story and historiography of Byzantine Cappadocia, with chapters devoted to its architecture and painting, as well as to its secular and spiritual landscapes. In the absence of a written record, it may never be possible to write a traditional history of the region, but, as Robert Ousterhout shows, it is possible to visualize the kinds of communities that once formed the living landscape of Cappadocia.