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 geographic parameters of the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-byzantine and early-modern art. Contact and interchange between 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 and the Carpathian Mountains. 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 arts of these regions by addressing issues of transmission and appropriation, expanding and theorizing cross-cultural contact, while also putting on the global map of art history the rich artistic production of Eastern Europe.

Maria Alessia Rossi, Princeton University, USA; Alice Isabella Sullivan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.