Last Judgments and Last Emperors: Illustrating Apocalyptic History in Late- and Post-Byzantine Art

What would happen when human history and the terrestrial world came to their end? According to Byzantine apocalyptic authors, the fate of the world was inevitably wrapped up with that of the Byzantine Empire as well as the Orthodox Church, and this theme unites the rich body of apocalyptic literature throughout the Byzantine era. Yet, it is not until the late-fifteenth century and well into the post-Byzantine period that we find any illustrated versions of these apocalyptic texts. Though the direct, pictorial representation of apocalyptic narratives was a late-appearing phenomenon, this dissertation shows that Byzantine apocalyptic beliefs also found other forms of expression in the visual arts of the prior centuries. The ideological subtext of the Byzantine apocalypse, over and above its narrative content, provided the exegetical foundation for visual forms that expand the definition of what is "eschatological" in Byzantine art. Beginning with an analysis of Byzantine apocalyptic literature as a sub-genre of historical chronicling, chapters I and 2 consider ways in which established visual forms in Byzantine religious art were re-used in innovative compositions in order to capture the essential apocalyptic theme of the triumphal, universal history of the Byzantine empire. Such examples are found predominantly in the monumental painting of Byzantine Orthodox churches from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, located in regions colonized by Venice. My dissertation considers these iconographic programs within the social and historical context of late-medieval colonization in the Mediterranean, analyzing how the visualization of Byzantine apocalyptic ideals promoted political agendas specific to the Byzantine-Latin encounter of this time. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the phenomenon of an illustrated, post-Byzantine manuscript of Byzantine apocalyptic texts, Venice, Marciana Library, gr. VII, 22. Chapter 3 presents an analysis of the text and imagery that demonstrates how the manu script should be read as a traditional Byzantine apocalyptic history, but also how this history has been updated for the sixteenth-century viewer. Chapter 4 explores the illumination of the Marciana manuscript as the product of a sixteenth-century revival in Byzantine apocalyptic literature that was determined in part by the tastes and interests of Italian humanist historians.