Telling stories with pictures: narrative in middle and late Byzantine monumental painting

Abstract

This article explores the narrative strategies employed in the monumental painting of the middle and late Byzantine period and considers whether the different methods of narration and the degree of narrativity can reveal anything about the function of the work, its creators, its audience and finally its period; in other words whether a narratological approach to visual representation could be a tool for analysing a work of art in socio-historical terms. This is determined firstly by identifying similar narrative structures in contemporary literature and secondly by looking for information on how contemporary viewers ‘read’ the ‘story’ in monumental narrative paintings.

The Past Is Evolutionary, the Future Is Byzantine: Kurt Weitzmann’s Contribution to the Research on Pictorial Narration

“…12 Few scholarly articles have touched upon Weitzmann's relation to pictorial storytelling; Jacobus Bracker shortly examined the Robert-Wickhoff-Weitzmann line in archaeology (Bracker 2015, pp. 316-26), but most used his ideas as a starting point, like Vicky A. Foskolou's study on narrative strategies in the monumental painting of the Comnenian and Palaiologan periods of Byzantine art, or Nektarios Zarras's paper on New Testament cycles in Byzantine churches (Foskolou 2019;Zarras 2016). Understanding the thematic change and the methodological shift Weitzmann's narrative analysis caused in art history, notably in Byzantine and medieval art history, means recognizing the strength and influence of the method he proposed.…”