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\"This is the first book to examine the late Byzantine peasantry through written, archaeological, ethnographic, and painted sources. Investigations of the infrastructure and setting of the medieval village guide the reader into the consideration of specific populations. The village becomes a micro-society, with its own social and economic hierarchies. In addition to studying agricultural workers, mothers, and priests, lesser-known individuals, such as the miller and witch, are revealed through written and painted sources. Placed at the center of a new scholarly landscape, the study of the medieval villager engages a broad spectrum of theorists, including economic historians creating predictive models for agrarian economies, ethnoarchaeologists addressing historical continuities and disjunctions, and scholars examining power and female agency\"--Provided by publisher.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism.Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

\"The Red Monastery church is the most important extant early Christian monument in Egypt's Nile Valley, and one of the most significant of its period in the Mediterranean region. A decade-long conservation project has revealed some of the best surviving and most remarkable early Byzantine paintings known to date. The church was painted four times during the 5th and 6th centuries, and significant portions of each iconographic program are preserved. Extensive painted ornament also covers the church's elaborate architectural sculpture, echoing the aesthetics found at San Vitale in Ravenna and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Distinguished contributors from a wide range of disciplines, including art and architectural history, ancient religion, history, and conservation, discuss the church's importance. Topics include late antique aesthetics, early monastic concepts of beauty and ascetic identity, and connections between the center and the periphery in the early Byzantine world. Beautifully illustrated with more than 300 images, this landmark publication introduces the remarkable history and magnificence of the church and its art to the public for the first time\"--Publisher's website.

The motif of the woman and the dragon has been prevalent in Western art since antiquity, yet has hitherto remained understudied, and artworks featuring this motif in Western Mediterranean cultures have been examined primarily in relation to the topos of the male dragon-slayer. This book analyzes artistic images of women and dragons over an extensive period, from Classical Greece and Rome (with forays to Egypt and Mesopotamia) to the early modern period in Western Europe. The unique methodology employed in the study of this motif reveals its sacred core, as well as its relationship to rituals of fertility and oracular knowledge, to the liminal realm between life and death, and to the symbolism of Great Mother goddesses. At the same time, the images explored throughout expose stereotypes and biases against women in unusual positions of power, which were embedded in the motif and persisted in Western European art.

“Although many of the iconographic traditions in Byzantine art formed in the early centuries of Christianity, they were not petrified within a time warp. Subtle changes and refinements in Byzantine theology did find reflection in changes to the iconographic and stylistic conventions of Byzantine art. This is a brilliant and innovative book in which Dr Anita Strezova argues that a religious movement called Hesychasm, especially as espoused by the great Athonite monk St Gregory Palamas, had a profound impact on the iconography and style of Byzantine art, including that of the Slav diaspora, of the late Byzantine period. While many have been attracted to speculate on such a connection, none until now has embarked on proving such a nexus. The main stumbling blocks have included the need for a comprehensive knowledge of Byzantine theology; a training in art history, especially iconological, semiotic and formalist methodologies; extensive fieldwork in Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Turkey and Russia, and a working knowledge of Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Latin as well as several modern European languages, French, German, Russian and Italian. These are some of the skills which Dr Strezova has brought to her topic.” Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA Adjunct Professor of Art History School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics The Australian National University

Since Manolis Chatzidakis’s pivotal publications on post-Byzantine Cretan icon painting in the 1970s, research in the field is, by now, very well established. In turn, these studies have demonstrated the contribution of Venetian Crete’s artistic production to European culture. Despite Giorgio Vasari’s condemnations of the ‘Greek style’, Byzantine icons remained popular in Renaissance Europe among Western patrons. Research on Venetian Crete has greatly benefitted from the survival of its archives, presently housed in Venice (Archivio di Stato di Venezia), an incredibly rich and invaluable source of information. One of the best-known published and referenced documents from these archives, supporting the wider popularity and dissemination of Cretan icons, is a contract offered to three Cretan painters dated 4 July 1499 concerning the production and delivery of 700 icons of the Virgin in just 42 days, by 15 August 1499, the day of the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin. This paper revisits the information the famous contract provides with the aim to scrutinise it further.

A nineteenth-century fascination with Byzantine cream-white reliefs can be traced through European collection patterns.3 Exemplary is the itinerary of the plaquette with the enthroned Virgin and Christ Child, now at the Cleveland Museum of Art.4 The ivory belonged to the Parisian count August de Bastard d'Estang and was acquired by Stroganoff in the late nineteenth century. Ottoman bookcases and medieval church treasures were enhanced with Byzantine ivories gifted, traded, or looted from the East.6 Their charm continued to seduce throughout the Early Modern period, when 'Greek' ivories were privately owned and displayed in Kunstkammers.7 Modern collection practices by art patrons, art lovers, and scholars further contributed to the exposure of the Byzantine material, which gradually reached the cases and storage rooms of museums across Western Europe and North America.8 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art-historical studies on Byzantine ivories were essentially born out of the visibility that the material gained in the private and in public sphere. Whether exhibited in Stroganoff's or other collectors' houses, or in museums, Byzantine dentine reliefs were increasingly available to the eyes and minds of scholars and intellectuals.9 While recent years have witnessed a rising interest in the history and significance of collecting and art market trends for the advancement of Byzantine studies, only a few discussions have been concerned with the intellectual frameworks that structured early approaches to the material.10 The assumptions and paradigms that shaped the research at the foundation of the discipline remain largely unexplored, but they tacitly continue to inform scholars' thinking in the present.11 Building upon historiographic approaches to late nineteenth to early twentieth century German studies on Renaissance, Baroque, and Greco-Roman art, in this article I look at the 1934 study of Byzantine ivories by Adolf Goldschmidt and Kurt Weitzmarm to reveal its entanglement with contemporaneous art historical and art theoretical discourses.12 I will first introduce the publication and a critical passage that will be examined through its language and concepts in three subsequent sections. The oeuvre was the sequel of Weitzmann's doctoral work and the first publication on Byzantine ivory caskets; it gathered in less than a hundred pages and eighty plates all Byzantine ivory 'reliefs', or icons, known at the time.14 The volumes on the ivory chests and the icons complemented Goldschmidt's series on Carolingian, Ottoman, and Romanesque ivories that appeared between 1914 and 1926.15 Kurt Weitzmann, a native of Witzenhausen, had earned his education in art history and archaeology from institutions across Germany and Austria, before arriving in Berlin in 1926 to work on his doctoral thesis under Goldschmidt.16 At that time, Goldschmidt, Professor Ordinarius at the University of Berlin between 1912 and 1932, was a scholar of international reputation and among the very first professors to teach medieval art at the university level.17 His studies on ivory sculpture soon become a model for art historical corpora and were praised for their punctilious stylistic and iconographic analysis, and their impressive photographic documentation.18 While the volume on Byzantine ivory icons was a collaboration between the professor and his former student, Weitzmann was responsible for most of its preparation.

The rich architectural heritage of Cyprus from the period of Byzantine and Latin rule includes 10 churches inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage list. Most of these monuments preserve wooden elements: whether structural, decorative or furnishings. Many preserve wall paintings that are considered among the best examples of Byzantine and Medieval art in the Eastern Mediterranean. The dating of these paintings as well as the church buildings themselves, has been based mainly on style, with occasional dedicatory inscriptions and related historical interpretation. We report early results from a project investigating the wooden cultural heritage of Cyprus and in particular the combined use of dendrochronology with radiocarbon via tree-ring sequenced 14C wiggle-matching to help place initial tree-ring sequences. This includes a floating 264-year Pinus brutia chronology from several monuments, which, with a ca. 5-year gap, suggests prospects for >700-years of P. brutia chronology for Cyprus, and, with one gap of several decades to fill, ca. 1100 years of Pinus nigra chronology for Cyprus. Several currently floating elements from the multi-phase UNESCO-listed Timios Stravros church at Pelendri, including a terminus post quem for the celebrated liturgical wooden cross, are approximately dated across the 11th to 16th centuries AD.

Today it maintains a prominent position in the art world through art festivals, such as the Venice Biennale established in 1895, which includes alternating the International Art Exhibition and, from 1980, the Architecture Exhibition (4). The image-conscious Grand Council supported extensive decoration of public buildings by eminent painters. [...]the Doges' Palace was decorated by leading Venetian artists. Author Contributions: All authors confirmed they have contributed to the intellectual content of this paper and have met the following 3 requirementsments: (a) significant contributions to the conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (b) drafting or revising the article for intellectual content; and (c) final approval of the published article. Received August 13,2017; accepted August 16,2017. ©2017 American Association for Clinical Chemistry * Address correspondence to the author at:

When presented with the observation that a painting by Barnett Newman looks like a Byzantine mosaic, Donald Judd replied, ‘A lot of things look alike, but they’re not necessarily very much alike.’1 Judd responded to what he likely viewed as a truism – the assertion that modern art looks like Byzantine art – with a truism of his own. Visual resemblance does not indicate ontological equivalence. In this instance, Judd precludes further discussion with his interviewer on the topic. Yet the comparative approach, especially pertaining to the relationship between medieval and modern, has found renewed interest amongst contemporary art historians. By virtue of their specialized training, many scholars who transgress the boundaries of conventional periodization tend to be pre- or early modernists.2 A perspective from the modernist side of the border comes from Clement Greenberg in his essay, ‘Byzantine Parallels,’ written in 1958.3 Prior to Judd’s dismissal of the Byzantine-modern connection, Greenberg reached the same conclusion. But if things that look alike are not alike after all, if the relationship between the two winds up in a pseudomorphic cul-de-sac, then why expend the effort to make the association in the first place? For Greenberg, the comparative approach was a defensive tactic meant to legitimize modern abstraction in the face of criticism leveled specifically by art historians. An account of the intellectual history surrounding ‘Byzantine Parallels’ not only reveals Greenberg’s unrealized investment in such a defence, but also the ways in which the study of Byzantine art history in the early twentieth century was intertwined with modernist discourse. Look-alikes are less about the objects in question and more about those who are doing the looking.