Parallel Universes: Byzantine art history in 1990 and 1991

Abstract

AbstractArt history, like many disciplines in the so-called humanities, has engaged in a bout of re-definition over the past decade. Studies of the art of Byzantium have not been immune to this wave of revision and re-assessment. Though it must be said that Byzantine has been affected less than Roman or, especially, nineteenth-century art history, the discipline is nonetheless in a state of transition, and this fact deserves greater recognition than it has received. Byzantinists have, I think, a tendency to compartmentalise scholarship by authors (or occasionally universities) without examining the paradigmatic shifts in the discipline as a whole. Studies that provide such essentially historiographical overviews are normally confined within the limits of a book review or to the preface of a monographic study. In both cases, the scope is necessarily limited by the content. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies has not included book reviews in the past, and my goal here is not primarily to write an extended re...