Transcultural Spaces in Mediterranean

On Thursday December 13, we had the unique opportunity to organize a round table entitled Transcultural Spaces in Mediterranean, which consisted of contributions of two specialists currently post-doc at the Centre for Early Medieval Studies. Chiara Croci offered a lecture entitled Campania between Rome, Byzantium and North Africa: Early Christian Art at Mediterranean Crossroads, followed by Chiara Bordino's talk on Byzantium and the Mediterranean Culture and Artistic Circulation and Interaction in the 11th and 12th centuries.

As the first speaker, Chiara Croci opened the question of Campania as a place between Rome, Byzantium and Africa. Placed at the heart of the Mediterranean world, Late Antique Campania was a region run by the mainland and the crossroads. This resulted in the creation of a transcultural space, whose artistic production was shaped by local, Northern African, and "oriental" stimuli. Based on examples from the Catacombs of Capodimonte, the Baptistery of Naples and the funerary Complex of Cimitile and with a critical regard to previous historiography, the contribution shown in which way the artistic production of the time developed in such a context.

Subsequently, with Chiara Bordino we had a chance to examine Byzantine pictorial decorations of 11th and 12th centuries in Cappadocia and in the Greek Islands (Naxos, Santorini, Patmos). These examples showed us the wide circulation of models from Constantinople and their adaptation in specific local contexts. The second and main part of her contribution focused on the paintings and mosaics of the 12th-century Nativity Church in Bethlehem, as a highly relevant example of interaction between cultures in the Mediterranean horizon. The decoration and the inscriptions of this space show the joint effort and the intertwined goals of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Byzantine Empire, and the Christian-Arabic communities in the Near East.