Byzantine Echoes in “Romanesque” France: Textiles, Enamels & Modern Myths
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The presence of objects of Byzantine or Islamic origins within church treasures of medieval Europe is one of the preferred topics for art historians to understand how specific stories, memories, and myths can become attached to artifacts taken out of their original context and brought into a new one. Usually, these objects are characterized by their appearance which marks them as somewhat different, distinguished from the “local” production. They are also often “old”, stemming from markedly older periods of production, and thus linked with notions of distance, exoticism, and sometimes associated with a certain “authenticity”. In some cases, as other pieces of spolia, they are also used to mark the superiority of one culture towards another. In this paper, I firstly presented the general framework of the reception of Islamic and Byzantine objects, often conflated, in European church treasures of the 11th-12th centuries, before moving the case of Conques – with focus on two categories of artifacts: textiles and enamels. |
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