On April 9–13th, a lecture series/block course by Katharina Meinicke (Universität Wien) titled The Umayyad Visual Culture between Continuity and Change took place in the Hans Belting Library. The course presented an overview of the visual culture of the empire of the first islamic dynasty, the Umayyads (AD 661–750), which was, figuratively speaking, a superpower on the crossroads, in the sense of both geography and history.