Experiencing the Last Judgement
Niamh Bhalla
Experiencing the Last Judgement
Niamh Bhalla
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Description
Experiencing the Last Judgement moves beyond a purely didactic understanding of the Byzantine image of the Last Judgement, as a visual eschatological text to be ‘read’ and learned from, and proposes instead an appreciation of each unique image as a dynamic site to be experienced.
‘The Last Judgment is one of the most versatile images in Byzantine iconography. Its diverse sources constitute a pastiche of biblical references, hagiographical accounts, and texts of apocalyptic nature, to be found in both Christian dogma and widespread popular attitudes and beliefs … Niamh Bhalla undertook and accomplished, with notable success, a particularly difficult task; her monograph constitutes the first, at least to my knowledge, comprehensive in-depth study of the function, power and agency of the Last Judgement imagery in Byzantium on various levels, emotional, mnemonic, gendered, socio-historical, didactic and rhetorical, as an immersive personal and shared experience that informs the identities of the individuals and the communities to which it is addressed. In this light, it constitutes an excellent contribution to the field and a landmark publication on the topic’ - Byzantinische Zeitschrift Bd. 115/3, 2022.
Niamh Bhalla is Course Leader and Lecturer in Art History at New College of the Humanities, Northeastern University in London. She completed her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK, and has previously lectured and worked on research projects at The Courtauld and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her research focuses on the social agency of late-classical and Byzantine imagery. She explores themes such as space, memory, the body, gender and rhetoric in relation to the experience of visual imagery.