This panel explores the mobility of Byzantine ‘cultural objects’ — including artworks and books, as well as iconographic models and textual traditions — beyond the empire’s borders from the middle Byzantine period onward. It investigates how material artifacts, as well as immaterial forms of knowledge and aesthetic expression, circulated across the medieval and post-medieval worlds, facilitating the transmission, adaptation, and transformation of Byzantine heritage. The papers analyze a variety of case studies to highlight how objects, visual languages, and literary traditions traveled across diverse regions, spreading from Byzantium to the Western Mediterranean, Eastern Europe and Kyivan Rus. The panel will reconstruct the trajectories of these cultural vectors, the networks and agents that enabled their circulation, and the ways in which they were reinterpreted in different social, religious, and political settings, thus shaping artistic and cultural landscapes beyond Byzantium itself. By focusing on both material and immaterial transmissions, this panel offers a broader understanding of Byzantium’s dynamic presence in interconnected artistic and intellectual spheres in the medieval and post-medieval world. It reveals Byzantine culture not as a static inheritance, but as a living, evolving set of traditions, reactivated and reshaped across time, space, and communities.
Cultural objects are vectors of Byzantine heritage. Their mobility within and beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire shows how Byzantium plays its important role in artistic and cultural transformations, on one hand, and how others imitate its artistic and cultural style, on the other. Indeed, this paper proposes to study the famous mosaics of…
The ancient Greek krater—a large, two-handled vessel used for mixing wine and water—had a long afterlife in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, and beyond. The Septuagint text of the book of Proverbs, traditionally attributed to King Solomon, describes the personification of Wisdom mixing her wine in a krater. Krater motifs decorate numerous late antique churches,…
From the fifteenth century onward, the Eastern Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas emerged as an entangled contact zone, where artists and patrons of Greek, Latin, and Slavic origin intersected. Among the most active agents in this arena were Cretan icon painters, who traveled along Venetian colonial networks circulating portable artworks, iconographic models, and techniques. Trained in…
Considered the “Bible of the Neoplatonists” (Cumont) and systematized by Michael Psellus, the fragmentary collection of the Chaldean Oracles was later rediscovered in Renaissance Europe and, through its pseudepigraphic attribution to Zoroaster, came to stand alongside other esoteric traditions of classical and late antique origin. The present analysis, building on several studies, especially those of…
The “Dialogue on the Faith of the Monk Euthymios with a Saracen Philosopher” and the “Confutatio Agareni” attributed to a certain Bartholomew of Edessa are among the few known examples of Byzantine anti-Islamic polemical controversies likely produced in the 12th century. Beyond their content and the insights they may offer into Byzantine knowledge of contemporary…