On April 5-6, 2019, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture will co-host “Eclecticism at the Edges: Medieval Art and Architecture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres,” along with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, the International Center of Medieval Art, and The Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. This two-day symposium focuses on the art, history, and culture of Eastern Europe between the 14th and the 16th centuries.

In response to the global turn in art history and medieval studies, “Eclecticism at the Edges” explores the temporal and geographic parameters of the study of medieval art, seeking to challenge the ways in which we think about the artistic production of Eastern Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. This event will serve as a long-awaited platform to examine, discuss, and focus on the eclectic visual cultures of the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian Mountains, the specificities, but also the shared cultural heritage of these regions. It will raise issues of cultural contact, transmission, and appropriation of western medieval and Byzantine artistic and cultural traditions in eastern European centers, and consider how this heritage was deployed to shape notions of identity and visual rhetoric in these regions that formed a cultural landscape beyond medieval, Byzantine, and modern borders.

Keynote Lectures

Dr. Jelena Erdeljan (University of Belgrade): Cross-Cultural Entanglement and Visual Culture in Eastern Europe c. 1300–1550

Dr. Michalis Olympios (University of Cyprus): “Eclecticism,” “Hybridity,” and “Transculturality” in Late Medieval Art: A View from the Eastern Mediterranean

Symposium Speakers

Dr. Vlad Bedros (National University of Arts, Bucharest): A Hybrid Iconography: The Lamb of God in Moldavian Wall Paintings

Dr. Elena Boeck (DePaul University): A Timeless Ideal: Constantinople in the Slavonic Imagination of the 14th–16th Centuries

Dr. Gianvito Campobasso (University of Fribourg): Eclecticism Among Multiple Identities: The Visual Culture of Albania in the Late Middle Ages

Krisztina Ilko (Ph.D. Candidate, Metropolitan Museum of Art Fellow): The Dormition of the Virgin: Artistic Exchange and Innovation in Medieval Wall Paintings from Slovakia

Dr. Nazar Kozak (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine): Post-Byzantine Art as a Network: Mobility Trajectories of the Akathistos Cycle in the Balkans, the Carpathians, and Beyond

Dr. Dragoş Gh. Năstăsoiu (Centre for Medieval Studies, National Research University, Moscow): Appropriation, Adaptation, and Transformation – Painters of Byzantine Tradition Working for Catholic Patrons in 14th- and 15th-century Transylvania

Dr. Ovidiu Olar (Nicolae Iorga Institute of History of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest): A Murderer Among the Seraphim: Prince Lăpuşneanu’s Transfiguration Embroideries for Slatina Monastery

Dr. Ida Sinkević (Lafayette College): Serbian Royal Mausolea: A Reflection of Cultural Identity?

Dr. Christos Stavrakos (University of Ioannina / Greece): Donors, Patrons and Benefactors in Mediaeval Epirus between the Great Empires: A Society in Change or a Continuity?

The symposium is free, but registration is required to guarantee seating. Please register here. For any queries, please contact the organizers, M. Alessia Rossi, The Index of Medieval Art and Alice Isabella Sullivan, University of Michigan at eclecticism.symposium@gmail.com.