Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline
Cambridge University Press, 1/31/2014
EAN 9781107033306, ISBN10: 1107033306
Hardcover, 432 pages, 25.3 x 18.5 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
The Late Byzantine period (1261–1453) is marked by a paradoxical discrepancy between economic weakness and cultural strength. The apparent enigma can be resolved by recognizing that later Byzantine diplomatic strategies, despite or because of diminishing political advantage, relied on an increasingly desirable cultural and artistic heritage. This book reassesses the role of the visual arts in this era by examining the imperial image and the gift as reconceived in the final two centuries of the Byzantine Empire. In particular it traces a series of luxury objects created specifically for diplomatic exchange with such courts as Genoa, Paris and Moscow alongside key examples of imperial imagery and ritual. By questioning how political decline refigured the visual culture of empire, Cecily J. Hilsdale offers a more nuanced and dynamic account of medieval cultural exchange that considers the temporal dimensions of power and the changing fates of empires.
Introduction
the Imperial image as gift
Part I. Adventus
the Emperor and the City
1. The imperial image and the end of exile
2. Imperial thanksgiving
the commemoration of the Byzantine restoration of Constantinople
3. Imperial instrumentality
the serially struck Palaiologan image
Part II. 'Atoms of Epicurus'
the Imperial Image as a Gift in an Age of Decline
4. Rhetoric as diplomacy
imperial word, image and presence
5. Wearing allegiances and the construction of a visual oikoumene
Conclusion
the ends of empire.