Late Roman and Early Byzantine Floor Mosaics in Cilicia

788 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.The present study aims a synthetic formal and stylistic analysis of the, so far, unearthed mosaics of the region by putting them together, and to enquire existence of Cilician mosaic workshops. Cilicia mosaics deemed as examples of provincial art which are productions of a region considered a backwater of both Constantinople and Antioch. However, the collected mosaics at present corpus contain a wide range of artistic productions presenting representations in high aesthetic quality, as well as crudely rendered primitive examples. The variegated productions dispersed to numerous locations in the region denote existence of several mosaic workshops. The synthetic analysis of the mosaic corpus demonstrate that the aniconic phase of the church decoration dating to the end of fourth beginning of the fifth century complies with the church decorations found at the same time period in neighboring regions. The analysis also yield that the earliest church floor of the region contained an aniconic version of a figural mosaic found in a civic structure in Antioch. One of the numerous outcomes of the present study is the unanticipated clustering of floor mosaics, mostly figural, dating to the fourth century.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD