Andronikou Anthi, Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022
Andronikou Anthi, Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
About the book:
This volume explores the social, cultural, religious and trade encounters between Italy and Cyprus during the late Middle Ages, from ca. 1200-1400, and situates them within several Mediterranean contexts. Revealing the complex artistic exchange between the two regions for the first time, it probes the rich but neglected cultural interaction through comparison of the intriguing thirteenth-century wall paintings in rock-cut churches of Apulia and Basilicata, the puzzling panels of the Madonna della Madia and the Madonna di Andria, and painted chapels in Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria. Andronikou also investigates fourteenth-century cross-currents that have not been adequately studied, notably the cult of Saint Aquinas in Cyprus, Crusader propaganda in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and a unique series of icons crafted by Venetian painters working in Cyprus. Offering new insights into Italian and Byzantine visual cultures, this book contributes to a broader understanding of cultural production and worldviews of the medieval Mediterranean.
About the author:
Anthi Andronikou is Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow. A recipient of fellowships and awards from Princeton University, the British School at Rome, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Christian Archaeological Society, and the British Academy, she has coedited in 2019 The Pittas Collection: Mythological Paintings and Sculptures. Her research interests include Italian art (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries), Byzantine and post-Byzantine art, Crusader art and material culture in the Holy Land, Bolognese manuscripts, transcultural approaches to Christian and Islamic visual cultures, and cultural theory. She also investigates early modern and late medieval Venetian art and its reverberations in the visual language of Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus. Anthi Andronikou’s research has appeared, among others, in the Art Bulletin, Artibus et Historiae, Journal of Medieval History, and Frankokratia. Her monograph Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean won the international “2023 Maria S. Theochari Award” of the Christian Archaeological Society.