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The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism

On 7 February at 5 pm (UK time), the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism will host Maria Costantina Terss via Zoom to deliver her talk, "From Glory to Glory: Irradiating the Embodied Divine in the Byzantine Iconophile Pentecost Image.".

Between the years of 726-787 CE and 815-843 CE, limitations on the expression of the divine through figural imagery, the eikon, were restricted in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. After this Iconoclastic crisis, the winning, iconophile party, the iconophiloi (friends of the icon), popularized their official stance through the creation of new images of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints. Traditionally, art-historians have focused upon the depictions of sacred persons. This paper, however, sheds light on an image of a sacred event through an examination of two ninth-century Pentecost images: the now lost mosaic of Hagia Sophia and the surviving illumination of the Paris Gr. 510, both, commissioned by the Byzantine iconophile patriarch of Constantinople, Photius.

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Maria Constantina Terss is a fifth year PhD Candidate at Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, under the supervision of Prof. Bissera PentchevaHer research focuses on Byzantine and Medieval art, and she is currently writing her doctoral dissertation, entitled, “The Synergistic Cosmos of the Liturgical Image. From Memory to Liturgy: Performative Dialogues in the Post-Iconoclast Art of Rome, Constantinople and the Carolingians.” This research focuses on how the role of the sacred figural image changes for these three groups in dialogue with each other in the aftermath of the Byzantine Iconoclastic crisis (726-787 AD and 815-843 AD). For the 2021-2022 academic year, Maria is a scholar in residence at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, in the Faculty of Divinity, at the University of Cambridge.

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Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/99394126097?pwd=a0xFN2dDcFNQVFpldTQrcjBhNFBE...

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