Evan Freeman holds a PhD in the History of Art from Yale University, where he wrote his dissertation on ritual objects in the Middle Byzantine Divine Liturgy. His primary research interests include art and materiality, ritual, and cross-cultural exchange in Byzantium and the wider medieval Mediterranean. He is also interested in Byzantium’s influence on medieval Russian art and architecture, and has published on the twentieth-century “rediscovery” of the icon and subsequent receptions of the icon by Pavel Florensky and other thinkers of the Russian Silver Age and Russian Religious Renaissance.
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Three chalices show the important roles that materiality, ornament, and craftsmanship could play in an object’s cross-cultural mobility, reuse, and preservation through the centuries.
The Byzantines kept adding mosaics to Hagia Sophia for centuries after it was first built, reflecting recent controversies, monetary donations, and even imperial marriages.