POSTPONED - The Third Mellon Byzantine Studies Lecture

The Third Mellon Byzantine Studies Lecture, entitled “'Don't Praise Artists, Praise Administrators!' Byzantine Bureaucracy as Cultural Creativity," will be presented by Prof. Antony Eastmond from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. The event will take place at the Rectorate Conference Hall of Boğaziçi University on 24 March 2020, at 4:00 PM.

Abstract:

This lecture presents a manifesto for the creative power of administration. Byzantium is synonymous with labyrinthine bureaucracy, underpinning a convoluted and devious political machine; its artistic culture is too often characterized as one in which innovation and change were stifled by faceless officeholders. It will be argued that bureaucracy was a force for inventiveness in the medieval Mediterranean, shaping ideas about how art is created and interpreted, and playing a major role in establishing the visual world of Byzantium.

Antony Eastmond is A. G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Art History and Dean & Deputy Director at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Key themes in his work center on the use of art to manufacture, display and manipulate identities on a public stage, especially on the frontier between religions and cultures. His has written extensively on Late Antique and Byzantine art, the empire of Trebizond, the art and culture of the medieval Caucasus (Georgia and Armenia), and relations between the Christian and Islamic cultures there. His most recent book, Tamta’s World (Cambridge, 2017), examines questions of gender, biography and art in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus on the eve of the Mongol invasions. He also recently edited Byzantium’s Other Empire: Trebizond (Istanbul, 2016).