Aesthetics and symbolism of Late Byzantine church facades, 1204--1453

This dissertation addresses the subject of architectural aesthetics and challenges traditional views about Late Byzantine era as one of artistic decline. The period under consideration spans the last two and a half centuries of Byzantium and the countries within its cultural sphere before their demise by the Ottoman conquest. Through examination of church exteriors, the dissertation explores an important aspect of the aesthetics and symbolism of Byzantine architecture. Ultimately concerned with the broader subjects of architectural aesthetics and semiotics of ornaments, my dissertation is firmly based on a first-hand study of a large number of monuments and the statistical information that such a study entails. The core of my research includes over two hundred churches in Greece, Turkey, Serbia and Montenegro, F. Y. R. of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Albania. Furthermore, I redress what is now recognized to be a modernist bias against buildings whose primary expressive language is aniconic decoration of exterior surfaces. The lavish decoration of Late Byzantine---also known as Palaeologan---churches has long been considered to be a way of compensating for the deficiencies of these structurally unimpressive buildings whose masons, allegedly unable to create innovative constructional solutions that marked earlier Byzantine architecture, channeled their skills into designing visually appealing facades. My engagement with architectural decoration is driven by a quest for the possible symbolic meaning of ornaments, lost over the centuries. The search for the semiotics of architectural ornament is justified by the highly codified nature of medieval art. Apart from having potential meanings, I argue, decorative motifs play a role in the context of the total facade design, complementing and even substituting elements of wall articulation. External decoration carries profound religious messages that transform church facades into 'screens' separating, not just physically but symbolically, the sacred space of the interior from the secular surroundings.