Colouring in a ‘Dark’ Age: Histories of Colour in the Post-Classical World, University of Cambridge via Zoom, September 20, 2024

The Colouring in a ‘Dark’ Age: Histories of Colour in the Post-Classical World Conference will be held in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, September 20, 2024.

This international conference revisits the varied roles of colour in the societies around the Eastern Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to c. 1000. Long neglected in scholarship until recently, colour is increasingly recognised for its importance to all aesthetic visual experiences: unfixed, universal, present yet intangible, it serves as unique vehicle for emotions and expression. Renewed scholarly attention has uncovered its roles in the economic, social, and religious lives of both the Classical period and the post-High Middle Ages, but has ignored the period between them. This age preserved the chromatic thinking of Antiquity for inheritance into our own time, but is in danger of being subsumed by a quasi-literal sense of the ‘dark’ age moniker that scholars have otherwise tried so hard to refute.

To attend, please register by September 19, 2024.

Speakers

Michael Motia (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
The Patristic Life of Colour & Religious Readings in Polychromy

Alexander Nagel (State University of New York, Fashion Institute of Technology) & Atefeh Shekofteh (Department of Scientific Research, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
East of Byzantium: Pigments, Polychromy, and Legacy in the Sasanian Empire—The Case of the Reliefs of Tāq-e Bostān, Iran

Liz James (University of Sussex)
Light and Colour in Byzantine Mosaics: 30 Years On

Bente Killerich (University of Bergen)
Immaterial Materiality: The Significance of Deep Purple and Blue in Early Byzantine Mosaic Portraits

Elpiniki Meimaroglou (University of Cambridge)
Colouring the Text: Literary Polyptychs in Late Antique Literature

Mai Musié (Swansea University)
‘Aithiopia’ in Colour: Exploring Ancient and Modern Migration through Art