Art and Crisis in the Late Byzantine Mediterranean

Art and Crisis in the Late Byzantine Mediterranean This session explores the role of the visual arts in manifesting, managing, and precipitating change and unsettlement in the late Byzantine Mediterranean; and conversely, how perceptions of uncertainty and instability informed the ways in which art was made, apprehended, and viewed in this world. The session foregrounds the notion of crisis. Scholars have habitually used this notion in a negative sense to denote periods of political unrest, social disruption, economic depression, pandemic, and warfare. In art historical discourse the notion of crisis has repeatedly been invoked to designate phases of artistic and cultural decline—the opposite of artistic “peaks.” In Greek, however, the term krisis (κρίσις) encompasses a different semantic territory; in its root meaning, the term refers to processes of decision-making, selection, and judgement, situations that call for dispute and adjudication. This more neutral semantic coloring is attested, for instance, in Byzantine conceptualizations of the Last Judgement, as well as in rhetorical theory and medical discourse. Taking into account the term’s original meaning, this session challenges the prevalent understandings of crises as—exclusively—periods of adversity and decline. Instead, the session proposes to examine instances of individual, collective, or institutional unsettlement in a more positive light, as situations in which habitual patterns of behavior, control, and decision-making prove inadequate, creating both the need and opportunity for the development of alternative means of discernment and intervention. To what extent does the notion of crisis, thus redefined, offer a valuable conceptual tool to explore the artistic diversity and inventiveness of the late Byzantine Mediterranean? The session’s ultimate aim is to make a methodological contribution through a critique of the persistent historiographic model of rise and decline that continues to structure scholarly accounts of Byzantine and medieval art.