The understanding of afterlife in Byzantine Art

The topic of this thesis is the way of handling death as a concept in Byzantine art, according to the scenes of death of saints and afterlife as depicted in icons like Last Judgement, Anastasis, The Heaven Ladder of John Climacus and Vita icons. During the process of research required by this thesis, examples of innovations rooted in classic Graeco-Roman traditions, views of the Fathers of Church, influences of patristic traditions and new theologic approaches were singled out from various scenes used as examples. For example, from afterlife themed pieces of art, depictions of the Last Judgement, generally share many similarities with each other and while in some examples, certain details are ignored, in general there is sort of unity between different examples. In the scene of Anastasis, we see a case of simultaneous development with scenes of Crucifixion and Ressurection, it generally follows same path in different pieces of art and only after it reaches the peak of development, we start seeing examples of innovations brought by newer eras; as can be noticed in samples from middle and late stages of Byzantine art. The Heaven Ladder of John Climacus had an important place in monastic spiritual life and as such, held great influence on monks, thus, its depictions often allegorically depicts their spiritual journey to Christ and difficulties they encountered on the path. Every step of the ladder has its symbolic meaning and generally, these meanings are embedded into scenes by the artists. At first, the depiction of The Heaven Ladder was rather simple and consisted only of the ladder and those on it, but during 11th- 12th centuries AD, we start seeing angels, demons, dragons and other motives on its depictions, imbuing it with different degrees of dramatic appearance. Another topic of this thesis is death scenes of saints as depicted in Vita icons and depictions of graves in them.