HIST Seminar: “Byzantine Cilicia in the Photographic Documentation: The Study Trips of Italian Art Historians in the Twentieth Century”, Livia Bevilacqua, 6:00 PM November 5 (EN)

Date: 05.11.2020
Time: 18.00 (AnkaraTime Zone)

Title: Byzantine Cilicia in the Photographic Documentation: The Study Trips of Italian Art Historians in the Twentieth Century

Speaker: Livia Bevilacqua

Abstract:
In the last decades of the 20th century, several scholars explored the southern regions of Anatolia, in order to record the surviving Byzantine vestiges. A group of Italian art historians from Rome, Urbino and Padova – led by Fernanda de’ Maffei – visited the ancient provinces of Cilicia and Isauria in a series of field trips between 1989 and 2000. The group went into areas that had been explored by travellers and archaeologists since the previous century, and they gathered new, valuable material, including photographs, sketches and notes of religious, as well as residential and public buildings of the Middle Ages. Thanks to those trips, some of the most relevant Byzantine monuments of the region have been studied in detail, although a significant part of the research material produced remains unpublished. It is now preserved in the Center for Documentation of Byzantine Art History (CDSAB) at Sapienza University of Rome and can be regarded today as a precious resource for the study of Byzantine monuments and artifacts of the region. I will present some examples from the archive, placing them in the context of international research of the time, and I will attempt to highlight the relevance of the material gathered in those intense years for the study of the cultural heritage of southern Anatolia.

This is an online seminar. To obtain the event link and password, please send a mail to byzantiumatankara@hotmail.com