L’article examine trois types de temporalités patrimoniales. Le premier définit l’unité d’une salle muséale comme espace d’exposition cohérent et interroge la coexistence des objets dans son enceinte, en prenant comme exemple la salle 501 du Louvre. En se focalisant sur les objets-palimpsestes et l’art composite, il laisse ainsi entrevoir le mélange entre art latin et art byzantin, les remplois et les circulations de styles, que cette salle met en avant. Le second type évoque les interactions entre exposition permanente et exposition (...) temporaire et, plus particulièrement, la manière dont deux mosaïques byzantines rares, qui sont exposées dans la salle 501 de manière inadéquate, retrouvent une certaine visibilité grâce à un événement inattendu : la guerre en Ukraine et une opération d’urgence. Le troisième type concerne les manières évolutives d’exposer l’art byzantin au sein du musée du Louvre. Le but est de mieux situer le projet de la création d’un nouveau département patrimonial a... (shrink)

Die alphabetische Reihung der Autorennamen erweckt ein irreführendes Bild der einzelnen Kontributionen, zumal da ja auch kein Vorwort erscheint. Die wissenschaftliche Leitung und Letztverantwortung für den Band lag weiterhin bei N. Oikonomides, der nicht nur das Manuskript abschloss, sondern auch noch die Stellungnahmen der Begutachter auswerten konnte, Fahnen aber leider nicht mehr erleben durfte. Den größten Zeitaufwand investierte sicherlich J. Nesbitt, der ja für dieses Projekt in Dumbarton Oaks angestellt ist. E. McGeer dagegen ist zwar ein sigillographischer Hoffnungsträger in Amerika, (...) sein Beitrag zu diesem Band war aber noch eher bescheiden. (shrink)

Two tapestry medallions from Byzantine Egypt decorated with interlaces are examined here with a view to teasing out the meanings they conveyed to the persons who saw and used them. Originally adorning domestic apparel or furnishings, the textiles now are held in the collections of the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. and of the Louvre Museum in Paris. The interlaces served either as protective devices meant to obstruct and bind evil spirits through the coils of their knots, or as (...) metaphors for the entanglements of the devil that had to be overcome to attain a good end. Floor mosaics in Cyprus, North Africa, and Jordan – especially those depicting labyrinths, in which the ideas that underlie the designs are more clearly expressed through inscriptions – provide a route to understanding the interlaces depicted in the textiles. (shrink)

Through photographs we preserve the past, and looking for the past is the very job of the archaeologist. But what are we looking at in an archaeological photograph? Archaeological photography is often largely deserted, to be scanned with a forensic gaze, towards finding evidence of what once took place. At the same time, photographs of excavated sites and artefacts have revealed stunning ancient works, shot as works of art. In Photography and Archaeology, Frederick Bohrer examines some of history’s most famous (...) archaeological excavations, as well as lesser-known and previously unpublished finds, from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Americas, and the ways these sites have been represented in photographs. Bohrer shows how the development of photography in the nineteenth century made archaeology available to a much wider audience, and he discusses how these images revealed the material traces of the past, as well as their meaning and use today. Spanning the dual histories of both photography and archaeology, the book makes evident how what we know of the archaeological past has always been related to how it has been photographically represented and circulated: in scholarly papers, popular accounts, scientific archives, museum catalogues and numerous other formats. Bohrer concludes that such images possess contending, if not mutually exclusive, properties. While photography seems to guarantee documentary objectivity, at the same time it also fundamentally alters the archaeological object, transforming it into a work of art. Along the way, he discusses archaeological examples and images by photographers including Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, John Beazley Greene, Ernst Herzfeld and others, to more contemporary photographers such as Aaron Levin, Roger Wood and Marilyn Bridges. Beautifully illustrated with fine archaeological images, many published here for the first time, Photography and Archaeologywill be of interest to archaeologists, art historians and photographers, as well as anyone concerned with, or captivated by, archaeology’s ongoing engagement with the past. (shrink)

Continuing from Part A (2016), in which we discuss the semiotic foundation for designing a virtual museum of Byzantine art, Part B presents an applied methodology for the representation of cultural artifacts through virtual technologies and semiotic techniques. We discuss how our semiotic model, case study semiosphere, contributes to design and evaluation research of such unique art-form representation and why the approach contributes as a whole to the field of Virtual Heritage (VH). Theorizing further the design implications integrating the (...) overall approach including the evaluation experiment of three VH applications with the participation of young users and its semiotic analysis, we formulate design guidelines that can be applied also to other types of cultural heritage and art. (shrink)

This paper presents an integrated framework applied towards the design and evaluation of a virtual museum of Byzantine art that combines the theorized fields of semiotics, virtual heritage (VH), and Byzantine art. A devised semiotic model, the case study semiosphere, synthesizes important principles from the theoretical background justifying the overall design and evaluation methodology. The approach presented has theoretical extensions to the understanding of the role technology plays in promoting a consummatory aesthetic experience for Byzantine art in (...) virtual environments, complementing the experience received from traditional Byzantine art media. Part A of the work presents the development of the semiotic foundation of the study prior to presenting the applied potential of the approach in design and evaluation of VH for Byzantine art, which appears in Part B. The final task of the proposed approach aims to support a meaningful interpretation, assisting in the promotion of the significance (value) of the virtual museum to potential interpreters/visitors. (shrink)

This work is intended as an approachable introduction aimed at students of archaeology, history or museum and heritage studies. Unlike most textbooks on heritage which discuss the creation of heritage as a cultural phenomenon or offer practical guides to heritage practices, it attempts to take a fresh approach by providing an introduction to themes in the field of heritage as it relates to the material legacy of our past.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) recently hosted the blockbuster exhibition, Africa & Byzantium, which ran from November 19, 2023, to March 3, 2024. This long-anticipated show and accompanying catalogue1 represent one of the first major exhibitions to place the contemporaneous arts of Byzantine, Coptic, Nubian, Ethiopian, and Islamic traditions in Africa side by side. Showcasing medieval Africa’s rich cultural heritage, complexity, power, and transcontinental influence, Africa & Byzantium will become a standard resource for scholars reevaluating Africa’s role in (...) medieval art and culture. Head curator of the exhibition, Dr. Andrea Myers Achi, has kindly agreed to an interview as a supplement to the current Convivium issue on The Arts of Medieval Northern Africa. Dr. Achi is Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art at the Met. She specializes in Late Antique and Byzantine art and archaeology in Northern Africa, particularly in Egypt. She previously worked on the Met’s exhibitions for Art and Peoples of the Kharga Oasis (October 11, 2017 – April 11, 2021), Crossroads: Power and Piety (March 6, 2020 – July 24, 2022), The Good Life: Collecting Late Antique Art at The Met (May 24, 2021 – January 7, 2024), and Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt (2024), which recently opened and will be on display through January 25, 2026. (shrink)

The history of ‘virtual’ museums is linked in the museological model of fruition to the history of the traditional museum, from the musas to the Louvre, from the wunderkammer to the intangible heritage museums, passing by Science Centers and Museums of Modern Art, from websites to augmented reality, from audioguides to video games, passing by QR Code. This history is traced by the visitor experience, from a free observation/browsing, to the guided observation, studying the types of interaction that the visitor (...) engages in, to the object ‘information’ that he or she acquires or handles in the visit, and also considering the essence of the museum as a ‘sacred place’. Do the most advanced models of virtual museums offer the same innovation in the fruition of the information? (shrink)

This volume explores the deeply interwoven connection of education, art and nature in the context of East Asia. With contributions from authors in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, the book considers unnoticed but significant themes involved in the interplay of nature, art, and education. It manifests how nature and art can educate, and how education and nature play the role of art. The chapters explore a range of themes relevant to East Asian characteristics, including skill acquisition, Japanese calendar arts and (...) ritual of feelings, garden architecture, the ritualised body, collaborative poetry art, translational language between humans and nature, the Confucian classical Six Arts, the artistic embodiment of the Kyoto School, and the heritage art based education in Korea. The authors examine these themes in novel ways to bring to light the relevance of the East Asian insights to the contemporary global world. This book is an outstanding resource to all researchers, scholars, and students interested in educational aesthetics, philosophy of education, East Asian studies, comparative education and intercultural education. (shrink)

The Monumental is an interdisciplinary collection of original, cutting-edge contributions by international researchers pursuing the epistemology and ontology of monuments over time and geography. The contributors are specialists in geography, architectural theory and history, prehistoric, Greek and Roman archaeology, modern art, Byzantine studies, landscape theory and heritage reception. Against the global climate of flux and uncertainty in the present turbulent world, the durability of monuments as "urban permanences" emerges as one of the few remaining spatial and mental anchorages. As (...) such it is needed, maintained, enhanced, imitated, landscaped and even invented. In particular, the monumental as a spatial and aesthetic phenomenon of perpetual importance has recently acquired major new meanings. It now emerges as a key political, spatial, aesthetic, symbolic, architectural and archaeological manifestation or entity, open to constantly new, even contradictory forms and expressions. This collection addresses the urgent need for relevant research. It breaks new ground by posing fresh questions on the ontology, temporality, purpose, politics, scale, place, contestations and aesthetics of and around the monumental, from prehistoric time to the present, as well as in both Eastern and Western geographies. Monuments are explored as bearers of the urban majestic, extraordinary and sublime. The Monumental poses questions about changing perceptions, the evocative power of representation, identity construction, ideology and symbolism, the vital necessity for a communicative and active public space around monuments, imitation processes across geographical space-time, as well as the powers that construct, deconstruct or identify the monumental but also the anti-monumental as such. Geographies of reference are the European space, the United States and Asia. Wide-ranging theorizations alternate with in-depth analyses of paradigmatic cases. Conventional as well as alternative forms of the monumental in the present shifting world are also pursued. The Monumental is of great value and interest to scholars, students and professionals in the fields of architectural theory, history and design, archaeology, art theory and history, Byzantine studies, restoration, urban design and planning, human, urban and cultural geography, cultural studies, social anthropology, Asian studies, as well as those in wider subdisciplines. (shrink)

An Archaeology of Disability is a research station designed for the Venice Biennale, Architettura 2021 by David Gissen, Jennifer Stager, and Mantha Zarmakoupi and exhibited later at La Gipsoteca di Arte Antica of Pisa in 2022, at the Canellopoulos Museum of Athens in 2023, and at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki in 2024. The research station works with languages and forms used by contemporary disabled people to reproduce elements—a ramp, a seat, an art gallery—from the ancient Acropolis in Athens that (...) vanished long ago and that have little or no extant material forms. Among the many people who contributed to the research station are two performers, Christopher Tester and Pia Hargrove, who performed, respectively, the ekphrastic film and audio description Sēmata (Signs) (2021). The following dialogic essay draws on conversations with the curators and performers led by Brooke Holmes and Pasquale Toscano. This dialogic form surfaces some of the collaborative aspects of the research station to highlight the ways in which such collaboration brings different lenses to antiquity. (shrink)

This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of how museums have (...) staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice. (shrink)

Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the "death of cinema" debate, Film History as Media Archaeology​ presents a robust argument for cinema's current status as a new epistemological object of interest to philosophers, while also examining the presence of moving images in museum and art spaces as a challenge for art history. The study is the fruit of twenty years of research and writing at the interface of film history, media (...) theory, and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of new film history and media archaeology. It joins the efforts of other media scholars to locate cinema's historical emergence and subsequent transformations within the broader field of media change and interaction as we experience them today. (shrink)

Despite the growing body of excavation finds and the steady publication of museum collections, the numismatic evidence remains an underutilized historical source. Historians who study Late Antiquity rely on archaeological evidence but tend to ignore coin finds, partly because numismatics developed as an independent field with its own set of specialized tools and research questions. Insufficient dialogue between the disciplines has delayed a proper appreciation of Early Byzantine coins as historical source and the development of a clear methodology for (...) their use in conjunction with the literary and archaeological evidence. In order to overcome such disciplinary divides, this paper proposes several research directions by highlighting the main benefits of integrating the numismatic evidence more fully into the historical narrative. These research directions include a greater emphasis on bronze coinage, the study of the long-distance circulation of people and goods, and distinctions between urban, rural, and fortified contexts. This methodological discussion is followed by a case study from Byzantium’s Lower Danube frontier. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an exceptional document preserved at the Louvre Museum under the mark MAO 2098. The manuscript is a calligraphic genealogical scroll relating to the Ḫwāğas, members of a Sufi Naqšbandi lineage of East Turkestan which was extremely powerful during the 17th and the 18th centuries. Striving to join the dots literally as well as figuratively, I propose to read the šağara in several different ways. Most obviously, the text provides some limited new information (...) on members of the Āfāqi branch of the Ḫwāğa family. At the same time, we can read the text as a communicative device serving to advance two intertwined social practices: family strategies and the construction of power. Produced within a forum of competition with other aristocratic households, prestigious Sufi lineages in particular, the scroll serves to highlight both the Šarīfian origin of the family and the hereditary succession of its spiritual leaders. At the same time, the manuscript’s remarkable aesthetic qualities served to impress upon those who saw in it the numinous force of the Ḫwāğas’ supernatural authority. (shrink)

Khorasan, Lands of the East, refers to the northeastern region of Iran. In the early Islamic period, the term Khorasan came to be used for a much larger area, reaching into Central Asia well beyond the Oxus river, encompassing large parts of northern Afghanistan, and even extending to southeastern Iran. This volume brings together state-of-the art research on the history, geography, archaeology, and the material culture of this vast region.".

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology showcases the theories, methods, and accomplishments of archaeologists who investigate the human mind—its evolutionary development, its ideation, and its very nature—through material forms. The intellectual heart of cognitive archaeology is archaeology, the discipline that investigates the only direct evidence of the actions and decisions of prehistoric people. Its theories and methods are an eclectic mix of psychological, neuroscientific, paleoneurological, philosophical, anthropological, ethnographic, comparative, aesthetic, and experimental theories, methods, and models, united only by their focus (...) on cognition. This volume encompasses the wide spectrum of the discipline, showcasing contributions from 66 established and emerging scholars from Europe, Africa, Asia, India, the Near East, North America, and Oceania. Significantly, the majority of chapters deliver substantive contributions that analyze specific examples of material culture, from the oldest known stone tools to ceramic and rock art traditions of the recent millennium. These examples include the gamut of methods and techniques, including typology, replication studies, chaînes operatoires, neuroarchaeology, ethnographic comparison, and the direct historical approach. The volume begins with retrospective essays by several of the pioneers of cognitive archaeology, presents a broad range of state-of-the-art investigations into cognitive abilities, tackles thorny issues like the cognitive status of Neandertals, and concludes with speculative essays about the future of an archaeology of mind, and of the mind itself. (shrink)

Digital visualizations of cultural heritage (DVCs) are typically used to re-create or re-imagine artworks in their original state. Their apparent efficiency raises questions about their relation to the historical artefacts: What is the visualizations’ status vis à vis the originals? Can they replace them? And if so, in what capacity? This paper explores these questions from the point of view of the DVCs’ potential epistemic yield. It argues that the knowledge they are supposed to provide amounts to mediating past experiences (...) the artefacts they model occasioned and that in this role they serve an agenda with a long pedigree labelled ‘art-historical empiricism’ (AHE). However, historicism about perception can sow doubt into the AHE enterprise, including the use of DVCs. The paper maintains that if AHE is to justify or guide the DVCs’ proliferation in museums and historical scholarship, its proponents better be equipped with means of assuaging the doubt. The paper closes by discussing a general strategy of testing the soundness of epistemic uses of DVCs. (shrink)

Art is saturated with cultural significance. Considering the full spectrum of ways in which art is colored by cultural associations raises a variety of difficult and fascinating philosophical questions. This curriculum guide focuses in particular on questions that arise when we consider art as a form of cultural heritage. Organized into four modules, readings explore core questions about art and ethics, aesthetic value, museum practice, and art practice. They are designed to be suitable for use in an introduction to philosophy (...) of art, as well as in more topically focused courses, particularly on topics concerning the ethics and politics of art. (shrink)

The study deals with ekphraseis on works of art and poses the question as to how far these texts can be a reliable source for the study or even the reconstruction of the artefacts they describe. Based on reception theory and readerresponse criticism, in the paper is proposed that as every text, byzantine ekphraseis on artworks presuppose an audience or readership, i. e. the one the author had in mind and on the basis of which he encoded his message. (...) In order to decode this message and by extension to extract any information about the described works of art we must aim to discover their “intended reader”, and identify his or her “horizon of expectations. This proposal is tested in the study of a well known piece of this kind, Manasses’s description of a mosaic floor with a depiction of Earth. The author’s dialogue with the earlier tradition of ekphraseis, his readership’s “horizon of expectations” combined with historical facts, allow us to suppose that Manasses is describing a composition with Xenia scenes and an asarotos motif created in the early byzantine period and preserved in the Great Palace of Constantinople up to the twelfth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.2 (2003) 306-309 [Access article in PDF] Philippe Rouet. Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases: Beazley and Pottier. Trans. Liz Nash. Oxford Monographs on Classical Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xiii + 167 pp. 21 black and white plates. Cloth, $74. This monograph examines the development of two major approaches in the study of Greek vase painting by focusing on a comparison of (...) the work of Sir John D. Beazley with that of Edmond Pottier. Beazley, an English scholar, spent his scholarly life attributing vases to various formerly unnamed artists based on [End Page 306] their style of drawing, thereby ascertaining for the first time the artistic history and stylistic development of Attic black-figure and red-figure vase painting. Pottier, a French scholar, founded the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, an international series whose original goal was to publish all ancient clay vases. Each scholar's interests contrasted with the other's in many ways. Beazley's work focused more on the object and Athens, while Pottier was opposed to the study of individual artists and was particularly interested in the relationship of the origins of Greek civilization to the East and the broader context of the vessels.The book's introduction sets the historical and intellectual background of Beazley and Pottier. Areas covered include the early history of collecting, initial attempts at defining the works of individual Greek vase painters, some influential early catalogues of Greek vases (e.g., those of Hamilton's collection), and the role that the copying of motifs from ancient pottery had in spreading the interest in Greek vase painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly the part played by the Wedgwood workshop. I miss here any reference to the fine work of Brian A. Sparkes on these subjects (The Red and the Black: Studies in Greek Pottery[London and New York, 1996] 34-63).The first chapter considers the most influential, immediate predecessors of Beazley and shows how their work formed the intellectual framework for his accomplishment. They are Wilhelm Klein, whose important study of and signatures on Attic vases still serves as the basis for our interpretation of them; Paul Hartwig, who was the first to attribute vases to an anonymous master; and Adolph Furtwängler, who in collaboration with Karl Reichhold initiated the monumental three-volume work, Griechische Vasenmalerei, which featured exceptionally accurate drawings of vase paintings. The author astutely notes that Furtwängler's work on attributing Roman copies of Greek sculpture to artists was likewise influential in augmenting the interest in style and artistic personalities. The intertwined relationship between connoisseurship, collectors, and the art market is touched on briefly in the discussions of Hartwig and Edward Warren. It might also have been noted here that the wording and style of Beazley's earliest work on the Kleophrades Painter clearly owes its inspiration to Hartwig.Pottier's early life and career are the focus of the next chapter. This was the time when museum catalogues and encyclopedic dictionaries were for many the signs of significant national scholarship. Indeed, after France's loss in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War, Pottier and many of his contemporary compatriots sought to affirm the intellectual vitality of their nation by initiating and completing such projects. Pottier's contribution was to publish Vases antiques du Louvre, in which photography was used for the first time on a large scale to illustrate the vases, and to serve as one of the editors of the Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, in which he was also responsible for many of the entries on vases.Chapter 3 returns to the subject of connoisseurship and the two non-classical archaeologists whose methodology bear clear resemblances to Beazley's. The first of them, Giovanni Morelli, was the first to attempt a scientific methodology for attributing paintings to unknown artists by examining the minor details [End Page 307] of drawings in order to discover the artistic language of the painters. Rouet concludes that Morelli paved the way for Beazley's work, for... (shrink)

One of the contemporary results of Germany’s memorial conundrum is the rise of its “counter-monuments”: brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being. On the former site of Hamburg’s greatest synagogue, at Bornplatz, Margrit Kahl has assembled an intricate mosaic tracing the complex lines of the synagogue’s roof construction: a palimpsest for a building and community that no longer exist. Norbert Radermacher bathes a guilty landscape in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood with the inscribed light (...) of its past. Alfred Hrdlicka began a monument in Hamburg to counter—and thereby neutralize—an indestructible Nazi monument nearby. In a suburb of Hamburg, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz have erected a black pillar against fascism and for peace designed to disappear altogether over time. The very heart of Berlin, former site of the gestapo headquarters, remains a great, gaping wound as politicians, artists, and various committees forever debate the most appropriate memorial for this site.4 4. The long-burning debate surrounding projected memorials, to the Gestapo-Gelände in particular, continues to exemplify both the German memorial conundrum and the state’s painstaking attempts to articulate it. For an excellent documentation of the process, see Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem “Prinz-Albrecht-Gelände,” ed. Reinhard Rürup . For a shorter account, see James E. Young, “The Topography of German Memory,” The Journal of Art 1 : 30. James E. Young is assistant professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America , from which this essay is drawn. He is also the curator of “The Art of Memory,” an exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York. (shrink)

As museums begin to revisit their definition of ‘‘expert’’ in light of theories about the local character of knowledge, questions emerge about how museums can reconsider their documentation of knowledge about objects. How can a museum present different and possibly conflicting perspectives in such a way that the tension between them is preserved? This article expands upon a collaborative research project between the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the A:shiwi A:wan Museum (...) and Heritage Center to compare descriptions of museum objects by multiple expert communities. We found that narratives and objects in use are key omissions in traditional museum documentation, offering us several possibilities to expand our concept of digital objects. Digital objects will allow members of indigenous source communities to contribute descriptive information about objects to support local cultural revitalization efforts and also to influence how objects are represented in distant cultural institutions. (shrink)

Alexander Sokurov’s latest film, Francofonia (2015), produced by the Louvre and filmed in France, takes up the issue of the Louvre in the middle of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris. This quasi-documentary, filmed along the lines of Sokurov’s signature documentary “elegies,” also encompasses the history of the Louvre up to the present day. Francofonia follows in the long line of Sokurov’s other films set in museums. Sokurov is an author who has worked more than any other (...) filmmaker to translate paintings into a cinematic medium. While engaging with art history and great museums, however, Sokurov also gives a poignant interpretation of the violence of history that often surrounds great works of art. Thus the museum, in Sokurov’s cinematic interpretation, is both an archive of the most valuable products of civilization, as well as a material monument to the founding cultural and political violence that produced and surrounds it. The overt scrutiny and hypervigilance with which Sokurov films museums affects the very mode of his filming: his camera operates as if it were a museum itself, each film becoming an attempt to save civilization from its own ruination, and from its own blindness. Every frame in Sokurov’s films is thus a freeze-frame, born out of the paralyzing tension between external historical nihilism and the beauty of art. (shrink)

The destruction of cultural heritage in war is currently attracting considerable attention. ISIS’s campaign of deliberate destruction across the Middle East was met with widespread horror and calls for some kind of international response. The United States attracted criticism for both its accidental damaging of Ancient Babylon in 2015 and its failure to protect the Mosul Museum from looters in 2003. In 2016, the International Criminal Court prosecuted its first case of the destruction of heritage as a war crime. While (...) the destruction of heritage is widely condemned, there has also been condemnation of calls to mobilize our resources for the sake of heritage protection when human beings face threats to life and limb. Such issues are both philosophically rich and personally significant to a wide range of people. And yet they have been largely neglected by academic philosophers. This book makes a substantial contribution to developing this new philosophical territory. The contributors are a mixture of internationally recognized authorities in their fields and early-career researchers working in this area. Their eleven original essays investigate a variety of philosophical and ethical issues arising from the phenomenon of heritage destruction in war, including conflicts between protecting heritage and protecting people, how we ought to respond to heritage that is damaged in war, the nature of the harm caused by such damage, and the morally appropriate treatment of sites of war and conflict that have themselves become heritage sites. (shrink)

On the back-cover of the book one reads that the author “suggests that the Roman Empire, in its surviving Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) form, maintained a continual and sustained part in shaping the life of the West until at least the seventh century …”, and “Byzantine objects found in the West – whether they arrived through trade, diplomacy or the travels of individuals – force us to reconsider the extent and the purpose of the Eastern Roman Empire's intervention in (...) the West, including Britain. In conclusion Dr Harris explores the idea of a ‘Late Antique Commonwealth’, extending from Britain to the Mediterranean”. From this résumé, in which the words ‘intervention’ and ‘shaping the life of the West’ figure prominently, one may conclude that the author is convinced that the Byzantine Empire in the East played an active role in the history of Western Europe. (shrink)

Hadrianoupolis lies on the principal western route from the Central Anatolian Plain through the mountains to Bartın and the Black Sea, 3 km west of the modern town of Eskipazar, near Karabük, in Roman Paphlagonia. It was a small but important site which controlled this major route and dominated a rich agricultural, especially vinicultural, enclave.In 2003 the local Archaeological Museum of Ereğli began a small-scale salvage excavation of the newly discovered main church of Hadrianoupolis, known as “Early Byzantine Church (...) B”, situated in the centre of the ancient city. Only the floor and foundation levels are preserved. The church was erected probably in the early 6th century AD and may have still been in use as late as the 7th century. The most important discoveries at Church B were the floor mosaics which show personifications of four Biblical rivers: Euphrates, Tigris, Phison and Geon. Animals, floral and geometric designs, and an extensive inscription are also represented.In 2006 archaeological excavations were begun in Hadrianoupolis by a team from the Dokuz Eylül University, İzmir, under the direction of Dr Ergün Laflı. As a result of our 2005 surveys, it has now been confirmed that Hadrianoupolis lay indeed on the site of modern Eskipazar, with finds dating from the 1st century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. It also was determined that the core of the ancient city extended as far as the modern village of Budaklar and the surrounding districts of Hacı Ahmetler, Çaylı and Eleler, along the Eskipazar-Mengen highway for 8 km east-west and 3 km north-south. The chora of Hadrianoupolis is much more extensive in size.The field surveys in 2005 identified the remains of at least 24 buildings at the site. Among them are two bath buildings of the Late Roman period, two Early Byzantine churches, a fortified structure of the Byzantine period, a theatre , a vaulted building, a domed building and some domestic buildings with mosaic floors. In 2006 trenches were opened to investigate two of the best preserved of these buildings: Bath A and Early Byzantine Church A. In 2007 “Bath A”, “Bath B”, a Late Roman villa, an absidal Early Byzantine building, as well as two Roman monumental rock-cut graves, were excavated.The 2006–2007 campaigns have established that Hadrianoupolis was a fortified regional centre during the late Roman and early Byzantine period , when it can easily be defined as a “polis” with civic buildings and a fairly large urban population, as well as an extensive agrarian rural population. Most of the visible surface remains belong to this period. (shrink)

The Byzantine art can also be called the Christian art of East, between 4th century in which arose and 14th century in which the sunset began. In the 6th century the true grandiose of the arts was created by the Byzantine. This art maintained these classic traditions for various centuries and the renaissance of 10th and 14th centuries has had above all the persistence and the awakening of the ancient spirit. In the second half of the 13th century, (...) we assist to the decline of the Empire of East, the advance of the invasion of Muslims and the separation from the Byzantine influence.The western culture is based on the reason of divine origin. The art, beyond the allegorical meaning, becomes technically constructive. The artist today difficultly succeeds to make a face human, an expression of the man-God. We are in full industrial age, from which we achieve egoism. Over the dogmatic contrasts between the two churches, the union is felt in spirit, and also in the spirit of art. The historical schism does not have the total force to separate; the re-unification of the Christian world is an aspiration of all the Europeans today. (shrink)