Human history has shown how monuments embody the experiences and expectations of their creating cultures, their self-idealization, political necessities and system of beliefs, their æsthetic traditions and values. MYRiCE has focused on a monument of a central symbolic significance for Byzantine culture, the now lost church of the Holy Apostles, a monument originally dating back to the age of Constantine the Great, the founder of Constantinople and the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire. This monument, like the other major foundation of the Byzantine capital—Hagia Sophia—attracted a great deal of attention across the centuries, from that of emperor Justinian I, who renovated it magnificently during the 6th century, with a cruciform building crowned by five domes, to that of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, who put it at the core of his promotion of Constantinople as the new Holy City; and again, from that of the intellectuals and clerics of the 12th century engaged in discussions around the apostolicity of the ecclesiastical sees, to that of sultan Mehmed II, who eventually decided to dismantle it, after his takeover of Constantinople (1453), in order to build on its site his own celebrative külliye and burial place.
MYRiCE aimed at providing the first thorough cultural-historical study of this monument by concentrating on a significant timeframe, the middle-Byzantine epoch (c. 945-1204), in an integrated and broad-sweeping perspective combining intellectual and cultural history with art history. The investigation has scrutinized the great diversity of indirect sources about the church: texts, iconography, architectural comparanda, foremost above all the church of San Marco in Venice. These sources, wide-ranging in time, play a considerable role not only in adjusting our understanding of the church’s lost morphology but also in enabling us to grasp the shifting cultural significance of the monument, its role and perception throughout the ages.
The very multiplicity of images used in describing the monument demonstrates how perceptions of its historical meaning significantly differed across the centuries. Whether a reflection of the Biblical cosmology and the prefiguration of the celestial Jerusalem or the symbol of the apostolicity of the Constantinopolitan church, namely the principle of its apostolic origin, this monument has played a crucial role in the history of the Byzantium, becoming one of its major mediums of cultural transmission beyond its borders.
This study eventually demonstrates how a monument could act as a prism for understanding successive historical and political contexts in which a culture evolves, allowing to illuminate key aspects of its development. The interpretive model offered in this study may serve as a framework for decoding any monument and the network of auxiliary rhetorical and visual media through which it may be conveyed across time and space.
