Monumentality: From Real Constructions to Their Cultural Understanding

Title: Monumentality: From Real Constructions to Their Cultural Understanding

By Maria Cristina Carile (Università di Bologna, Cultural Heritage)

Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2025

Time: 1730-1900

Room: FFB-05

Abstract: Since Late Antiquity, the architecture of Roman and Byzantine cities was characterized by a distinct grandeur, expressed in built spaces populated with large-scale structures and massive use of precious and durable materials. Across the Empire, this phenomenon continued in diverse and sometimes more nuanced forms, reflecting broader developments in architecture and building practices throughout the history of Byzantium. Considering buildings both as individual entities and as components of the broader urban fabric, such grandeur can undoubtedly be conceptualized as monumentality. Yet several questions arise. Was monumentality an intentional feature of Byzantine architecture — and of Byzantine cities more broadly? Or is our contemporary perception of Byzantine architecture as inherently monumental a largely modern construct, shaped by the interpretive frameworks and aesthetic expectations of scholars? Moreover, can an entire city itself be regarded as monumental? This paper examines the concept of Byzantine monumentality by considering buildings and urban spaces that had a long-lasting impact on the formation of Byzantine — and even contemporary — built environments. These constructions also generated cultural frameworks of understanding that, as this paper will argue, may not have been typical of Byzantine sensibilities but nevertheless came to weigh heavily on architectural perception — on the “Byzantine eye,” so to speak. Beginning with the Byzantine city, the paper then turns to buildings and even micro-architectures, in order to reassess a central concept that centuries of scholarship have applied to Byzantine architecture: its widely accepted monumentality.

About the speaker: Maria Cristina Carile is a Byzantinist with specialization in art history and archaeology. From November 2018 she holds the position of Associate Professor of History of Byzantine Art (L-ART/01 History of Medieval Art) at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna. Her methodology is characterized by the joined study of material and visual sources and texts. At the moment her research is dedicated to artistic culture and the circulation of visual communication codes in Late Antique and Byzantine Mediterranean, and particularly in the Adriatic and Aegean Sea. She has presented her research at national and international conferences, scientific lectures and seminars and extensively published book, articled, and book contributions on her research themes

Organized by the Department of Archaeology