International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Besim Tolga Uyar
University of Nevsehir Cappadocia, Nevsehir, Turkey;
[e-mail]
Thirteenth-Century Monumental Painting in Cappadocia: 
The Artistic Bonds between Byzantium, Seljuk Rūm, 
and the Eastern Mediterranean World
The cultural residue of the Greek communities of Cappadocia living under Seljuk rule 
represents the fullest and most detailed evidence for the multicultural artistic and social landscapes 
of late Byzantine Asia Minor. Although art historians have examined many of the thirteenth-century 
painting programs of the region, there has been little attempt to place them within a broader cultural 
context. In order to fill this lacuna, paper follows an interdisciplinary investigation of art history, 
social, political, and geographical history, anthropology, archaeology, and epigraphy. Grounded in 
a close examination of a large corpus of wall paintings, and containing significant new visual and 
epigraphic data the my survey aims to demonstrate methodologically how visual culture can be 
used to understand the environment that produced it.
Annemarie Weyl Carr
Southern Methodist University, Newark DE, United States;
[e-mail]
Icons: What Changed in the Thirteenth Century?
A great deal happened in panel painting during the 13
th
century. But asking what happened 
is not the same as asking what changed. Change requires clarifying “for whom?”: do localized 
developments like Cyprus’ pastiglia constitute change, or must change be embracing, and if the latter, 
whom must it embrace, given the complex layering of cultural, religious, and political identities? 
Change implies that what happened left a residue. Yet many of the century’s most famous icons 
remained 
unica
. Do they constitute change, or perturbation? The torrent of culturally mingled icons 
at Sinai, too, ceased precipitously with the demise of the Crusader states, leaving little summative 
residue. So what did change?
The most fundamental change is quantitative: panel painting proliferated. The explosive 
increment of evidence makes it hard to judge whether habits of use had changed, or simply become 
more visible. At Sinai, it is not diversity, but convergence that stands out, as painters of all traditions 
repeated standard clusters of templon images. Sinai’s many chapels must have assumed a recurrent 
scheme of adornment, however diverse in style. The templates emerged in the later 12
th
century; 
but in the 13
th
they became a canon. They comprised half-length, single figures, abandoning the 
narratives of the 12
th
-century epistyles. Narrative, by contrast, colonized the 
Vita 
icons. Though 
initiated in the 12
th
century, these again proliferated in the 13
th
, their mating of icon and narrative 
giving a new, multi-vocal density to individual panels.

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39
On Cyprus, where over 80% of 13
th
-century icons are of despotic scale, the templon must 
again have dominated the expanded icon production. But how did the icons relate to it? The 25 
icons of Mary so far outnumber the three of Christ that they must have served more ritual functions 
than just balancing Christ around the Holy Doors. They too were colonized by narrative: a third 
of the 25 have scenes on their reverse. Even more emphatically than in the 
Vita
icons, narrative 
here adds visual and intellectual weight to the single-figure icon, expanding it dimensionally. Most 
bilaterals, moreover, had poles, implying a mobility that gives concrete realization to the three-
dimensionality of their bilateral iconography. Like 
vita 
icons, bilateral and pole icons go back to 
the 12
th
century. But only now do they assume an identifiable repertoire of characteristic themes, 
a numerical proportion among the icon population, and a physical magnitude that confers upon 
them a weight and multi-dimensionality akin to that of fresco.
In Kastoria and Mount Athos, too, large icons of scenes from the very beginning of the 
13
th
century give way thereafter to single-figure panels of despotic scale. In Kastoria, both 
Vita
and bilateral icons appear. Neither appears on Athos, but here one watches a different process of 
weightiness emerge. The figures themselves assume volume, adding a visual monumentality to the 
monumentality of message achieved by mating narrative and icon. At the end of the century, as 
seen at Ohrid, great panels emerge that join the two kinds of monumentality, with grandiose scale, 
voluminous figure style, and multiple types of imagery. Rooted in 12
th
-century developments, they 
have a monumentality that was both truly new, yet deeply Byzantine.