Travelers, scholars, and pilgrims have been drawn to Mount Athos time and again, but their histories have not always been told, in some cases because the collections have been misplaced and forgotten, and in others because the materials are not accessible, as they have not been digitized and researched yet. This session will showcase the work accomplished by the Connecting Histories. The Princeton and Mount Athos Legacy project. At the heart of this project is an international collaborative effort to value the Mount Athos collections on the Princeton campus and make them more discoverable and accessible by digitizing, researching and contextualizing them for teaching and research. The papers in this session will offer insights into six different collections related to Mount Athos held in Visual Resources and the Index of Medieval Art in the Art & Archaeology Department, and Graphic Arts in Special collections in Princeton University Library. These collections include the 1929 expedition to Mount Athos (with its film); the plethora of materials compiled in the 1930s by Professor Kurt Weitzmann; Professor Slobodan Nenadović’s collection of Hilandar monastery; the Index of Medieval Art holdings related to Mount Athos; the engravings related to Mount Athos in Special Collections; and the Gabriel Millet archive from the Collections of the EPHE and the Collège de France in conversation with graphic arts materials at Princeton.
Kurt Weitzmann (1904–1993) emigrated from Germany to Princeton in 1935, where he served as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1935–1972) and as a professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology (1945–1972). He left behind an enormous legacy in the field of art history, pioneering research into medieval ivories, Byzantine manuscript miniatures,…
This paper explores how archival collections can open new perspectives on Byzantine and Athonite heritage through the case of the Slobodan M. Nenadović Collection at Princeton University. Acquired in 1987 and supplemented by later shipments, the collection comprises more than 1,100 items – architectural drawings, field sketches, rubbings, photographs, and albums – documenting Hilandar Monastery…
The monastic communities of Mount Athos preserve one of the richest corpora of Byzantine and post-Byzantine religious art. Despite its significance, much of this material has historically remained difficult to access for the international scholarly community. This paper examines the cataloguing of Athonite material within the database of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton…
This paper examines the phenomenon of Orthodox religious engravings, often referred to as “paper icons”, through examples preserved in the Special Collections of Firestone Library at Princeton University. It focuses on how these works functioned as authentic devotional images between the 17th and 19th centuries. Beyond illustrating Athonite monasteries and patron saints, these engravings incorporate…
This paper examines Gabriel Millet’s expeditions to Mount Athos and their significance for both the historiography of Byzantine art and the construction of the Holy Mountain as a “landscape of myth” in Western imagination. Drawing on the collections and archives of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) and the Collège de France, mainly photographs,…