Author Description

Cyprus has always shown a remarkable openness to divergent cultures--at no time more than in the Middle Ages, when successive Byzantine and Latin conquerors settled on the island and dominated its art. These two societies profoundly influenced each other and their interchange resulted in art of great richness and diversity. The fourteen distinguished and generously illustrated studies in this volume provide sharply focused views of the island's artistic evolution in this period, beginning with an archaeological report on Early Christian graves built into abandoned pagan tombs in the fifth century and ending with an essay on the extravagant Venetian-style Cypriot frescoes of the sixteenth century. In between are a wide range of studies of Byzantine Cypriot architecture, stone carvings, frescoes, icons, illuminated manuscripts, and ceramics. The contributors draw on these works, many of which are poorly known and some of which have never before been reproduced, to reopen such crucial questions as whether artistic influences were provincial or metropolitan and to disentangle the many medieval cultural traditions that are preserved so uniquely in Cyprus. In the process, they reveal the astonishing tenacity and flexibility of the Byzantine style. The volume also contains an assessment of the distinguished Greek scholar Doula Mouriki's contribution to the study of Byzantine art and a bibliography of her many publications. The contributors are Mary Aspra-Vardavakis, Charalambos Bakirtzis, Charalambos Bouras, Susan Boyd, Carolyn L. Connor, Efthalia Constantinides, Slobodan Ćurčic, Melita Emmanuel, Irmgard Hutter, Henry Maguire, Athanasios Papageorghiou, Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzis, Panayiotis L. Vocotopoulos, and Vera von Falkenhausen. -- "CAA reviews"