International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Galina
Fingarova
, 
The Church of St. Mary in Apollonia as a Milestone between East and West
Katerina
Kontopanagou
, 
The Christian Monuments of Epirus in the 17
th
and 18
th
C.: 
Creating the Social and Economic Profile
Christos
Stavrakos
, 
Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Foundation Legends of Monasteries in Epirus: 
Interactions/Connections between the Past and Present and Its Understanding in the Society

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352
Lorenzo Riccardi
Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy; 
[e-mail]
Unitary but Incomplete and in Part Lost. 
The Mosaics and the Scuptural Decoration of the Parigoritissa in Arta: 
Status Quaestionis and Some Observations
My paper focuses on the mosaics and the sculptures of the Parigoritissa church in Arta, that – 
as a whole – display an unusual solution without any comparison with previous monuments both 
in Byzantine Art and in Western Art.
The paper is divided into two parts, dealing respectively with the 
status quaestionis
of the inner 
decoration of the church and some working hypothesis about its original configuration. In the last 
decades, several scholars denied to refer some “Western” sculptures of the 
naos
(that are the west 
and north archivolts with human figures) to the second phase of the Parigoritissa, around 1290-1296, 
considering them as a re-use from the former church, around 1250-1260. However, these works belong 
to the same workshop of the bases of the colonnettes as well as of several capitals of the gallery’s and 
baldachin’s columns. Therefore, they are expressly produced for the Parigoritissa II.
In the second part of my paper I attempt to demonstrate that the carved and mosaic decorations 
were wider than the current remains and were composed of other elements, that are now lost. I analyze 
some wandering sculptures and the photographs that are taken before the Orlandos’ restoration 
after the Second World War. On the basis of these observations, I propose a new hypothesis about 
the display of the inner decoration of the church, where two different artistic 
media
coexist.