Between St Bernard and St Francis: a Reassessment of the Excavated Church of Beaulieu Abbey, Nicosia

Abstract

In a section of a chapter on the historiography of Gothic architecture in the formerly Byzantine-ruled territories of the eastern Mediterranean entitled ‘Perspectives and Future Directions’, Tassos Papacostas summed up the relative lack of impact that this traditionally marginal field of medieval artistic production has had on wider arthistorical discourses. In asking why ‘western’ medievalists should ‘bother to look’ at Gothic buildings in the East, he argued that these buildings are of interest to them primarily from the point of view of the cultural, technical and financial processes involved in the transfer of western artistic idioms and models to lands hitherto steeped in an altogether different architectural and artistic tradition. However, it is also the case that, while the prevalent trend in the study of medieval architectural monuments in the eastern Mediterranean prioritizes the local context and how it affected the artistic process, this need not preclude the possibility that at least a few of these buildings could challenge long-held assumptions about western European developments and open new perspectives on them, if approached with the right questions in mind.