Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Friday, April 6, 2018 in Divinity School, Events, HART, Lectures, News, Student/Alumni, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Architectural historian and HART alumna Jelena Bogdanović, MA’02, will present a lecture entitled “The Canopy and the Byzantine Church” on Saturday, April 14, at 3 pm in Room G-23 of Vanderbilt Divinity School. Bogdanović, associate professor of architectural history and theory at Iowa State University, will examine the canopy—a four-columned structure with a roof—as an iconic image of the Temple and highlight its use in the architectural design and visual arts of Christians in Byzantium, medieval Serbia, and the eastern Mediterranean.

Drawing on the conclusions of her monograph, The Framing of Sacred Space: The Canopy and the Byzantine Church (Oxford University Press, 2017), she will address how the canopy was used to reaffirm architectural, symbolic, and sacred ties between the Old and New Covenants in Byzantine Christianity. Bogdanović offers the first study of canopies and their function as symbolic units in Byzantine churches. Canopies were architectural objects that provided design integrity, but they were also seen as a bridge between the physical and the transcendental realms.

Her areas of scholarly expertise include cross-cultural and religious themes in the medieval Byzantine, Slavic, Western European, and Islamic architecture of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. A leading historian of Serbian medieval art and architecture at Iowa State, she holds an engineering degree in architecture from the University of Belgrade, a master of arts degree in the history of art from Vanderbilt, and a master of arts and doctoral degrees in art and archaeology from Princeton.

Immediately following Bogdanović’s presentation there will be a gallery tour of “Eikon: A Triple Encounter” in room G-20 of the Divinity School. Curated by Julia Liden, candidate for the master of theological studies degree, the exhibit serves to illustrate the central role such frescoes played in communicating Christianity to the faithful. These large works were created in the medieval fresco technique by Zdenka Živković (1921-2011), the internationally recognized fresco copyist and restorer who sought to produce a large number of copies of frescoes, especially from endangered churches and monasteries in Serbia and Macedonia.

Drawn from Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery’s collection of Živković’s full-scale fresco copies created from the original paintings found in Macedonian and Serbian monasteries, the exhibit will remain on view through April 20. Gallery hours for “Eikon: A Triple Encounter” are Monday, Wednesday and Friday from noon to 2 pm in room G-20 (ground floor of the Divinity School).

On Friday, April 13, the History of Art Department will host a coffee hour for Bogdanović in the Visual Resources Center, Cohen Hall 134, from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. Faculty, students, staff and alumni are invited to attend.

Sponsored by Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture & Sacred Borders, the current Divinity School exhibit is in conjunction with Bogdanovic’s lecture. Additional sponsors are the Department of History of Art, the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies, the Department of History, and the Department of Religious Studies.