Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Traditions

This volume builds upon the new worldwide interest in the global Middle Ages. It investigates the prismatic heritage and eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, while challenging the temporal and geographical parameters of the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and early-modern art. Contact and interchange between primarily the Latin, Greek, and Slavic cultural spheres resulted in local assimilations of select elements that reshaped the artistic landscapes of regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north. The specificities of each region, and, in modern times, politics and nationalistic approaches, have reinforced the tendency to treat them separately, preventing scholars from questioning whether the visual output could be considered as an expression of a shared history. The comparative and interdisciplinary framework of this volume provides a holistic view of the visual culture of these regions by addressing issues of transmission and appropriation, as well as notions of cross-cultural contact, while putting on the global map of art history the eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe. Contents 5 Acknowledgements 9 List of Contributors 11 List of Illustrations 15 Foreword 21 Introduction 29 Negotiating Traditions 49 1 Cross-Cultural and Transcultural Entanglement and Visual Culture in Eastern Europe, ca. 1300–1550 49 2 Serbian Royal Mausolea: 77 3 Byzantine Forms and Catholic Patrons in Late Medieval Transylvania 97 4 Buttressing Orthodoxy: Imagining Hagia Sophia and Celebrating Constantinople in Sixteenth-Century Russia 123 5 Eclecticism and Originality in the Early Post-Byzantine Art of the Ottoman Balkans 151 Shifting Iconographies 177 6 Pro or Contra Filioque? 177 7 The Dormition of the Virgin Between East and West 199 8 The “Hybrid” Iconography of the Agnus Dei in Moldavian Wall Paintings 219 9 The Akathistos on the Move and the Geography of Post-Byzantine Art 241 10 The Crucified Monk at the Edge of Traditions 259 Patterns of Patronage 279 11 “Sic enim Constantinus . . .” 279 12 Donors, Patrons, and Benefactors in Medieval Epirus Between the Great Empires 311 13 Albanian Votive Images as Media of Transcultural Interaction Between Tradition and Innovation 335 14 Toward a New Era: 361 15 A Murderer Among the Seraphim: Lăpușneanu’s Transfiguration Embroideries 389 Indexes 421