21st International Medieval Congress

Boys Riding a Camel. Great Palace Mosaic Museum, Istanbul

Conference Date: Jul 07, 2014–Jul 10, 2014 Location: University of Leeds Leeds UK

Participants

Dr. Vasileios Marinis (Yale University)

Organizer and moderator

Dr. Rina Avner (Israel Antiquities Authority)

What is Provincial about the Provinces of Eretz Israel? Selected Case Studies of Early Byzantine Architectural Sculpture and Floor Mosaics from the Holy Land

This paper focuses on three provinces of Israel during the Early Byzantine period (4th–7th century CE), all situated west of the river Jordan: Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda, and Palaestina Tertia (Salutaris). Selected examples of architectural sculpture and floor mosaics will be compared to similar artworks from Constantinople and from Antioch, the capital of the dioecese of Oriens, to which the Holy Land was subjected since the Roman era.  The goal is to revisit the question of “provincial” art in Eretz Israel by focusing on the following issues: the influence of imperial construction projects in the Holy Land on local works; the possible effect of the diverse geological terrain of these provinces on the development of local styles; the earlier, diverse indigenous artistic traditions, which relate to the regional diversity of the land and to the various demographic groups that settled in the Holy Land prior to the fourth century.

Dr. Örgü Dalgıç (Yale University)

Too Good to be Provincial—Too Poor to be Constantinopolitan: Late Antique Floor Mosaics From Istanbul

While the assumption in scholarship has been that Constantinople was the home of the highest quality works of art, the study of floor mosaics from the city requires the reframing of this scholarly paradigm.  The Great Palace mosaics, discovered in the 1930s, were of superb quality.  Nothing else that came from the excavations in the city was comparable, neither in style nor in the richness of iconography, to the point that scholars had to look for their models in the provinces.  At the same time, the rest of the mosaics from the city have been labeled as “looking like provincial works of little significance” and were conveniently forgotten in the museum storages. This paper will present a historiography of the study of floor mosaics of Constantinople and its implications for art in other media.

Theodora Konstantellou (University of Athens)

Provincial’ wall paintings re-examined: A different perspective on painted decorations from the island of Naxos, Greece

The study of painting production in the Byzantine provinces has been largely based on the dual hermeneutical scheme of “centre-periphery”. The dominant mode of analysis emphasized the history of forms and favored the assessment and classification of painted decoration in qualitative terms. However, the study of the complex process of visualizing the sacred has been neglected. By examining evidence from the Aegean island of Naxos, this paper aims to provide a contextual analysis of imagery and to highlight the active role of local social and cultural dynamics.