The article analyses the collaborations between the residents of Villa Medici in Rome and the members of the French School of Athens. Its aim is to render explicit how the revelations of archaeology, actively disseminated by members of the French School of Athens, the “Athéniens”, had an important impact on the approach of certain pens…[Read more]

This publication is part of the project “Ricontrans – Visual Culture, Piety and Propaganda. Transfer and Reception of Russian Religious Art in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean (16th to Early 20th Century)”, funded from the European Research Council (erc) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant…[Read more]

Elodie Paillard, ‘Greek Theatre in Roman Italy: From Elite to Autocratic Performances’, in E. Csapo, H.R. Goette, J. R. Green, B. Le Guen, E. Paillard, J. Stoop, P. Wilson, Theatre and Autocracy in the Ancient World, De Gruyter, 2022

This book explores the staging of non-élite characters in the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles and how they related to contemporary middling citizens. The structure of fifth-century Athenian society underwent deep changes between the early and late plays of Sophocles. The appearance and growing political importance of a middling…[Read more]

This conversation revolves around Dora Apel’s work in the field of art and memory. Memory, in its mediating force, is critical for our understanding of the present and the construction of a future, or, rather, as Dora Apel posits it in her recent book Calling Memory Into Place: “Memory effects are not about the past. How do they shape the pre…[Read more]

During the Neo-Assyrian period (approximately 934-612 BCE, based in modern Iraq) the annals and royal inscriptions of several kings mention women with a curious title: ‘Queen of the Arabs’. These women have been included in previous discussions regarding Assyrian interaction with the ‘Arabs’, but a full investigation into their roles as rulers…[Read more]

Images of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9) in illustrated Christian manuscripts are suggestively similar to representations on the Tower card in many versions of the Tarot deck; both genres show the Tower being destroyed from above, with oversized persons falling head-first from it. In terms of connections between heaven and earth, the antithetical…[Read more]

This paper compares psychostasia and/or kerostasia concepts from Indo-European, Semitic and adjacent cultures, and relates them to Cognitive Metaphor Theory. In the context of metaphysical weighing, the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all associated lightness with goodness and/or a favourable outcome; Hinduism does likewise. The…[Read more]

This course focuses on the impact of the view from the car in the invention of new representational strategies in architectural and urban design. The automobile has reshaped our conceptions of space and our modes of accessing and penetrating the urban and non-urban territory in multiple ways, revolutionizing how architects perceive the city and…[Read more]

This book explores localized Hindu elements in Southeast Asian art from ancient times to present

This paper aims to examine models by which symbolism of light and lamp in
the Mediterranean region was manifested in the early Christian visual culture,
i.e. lamp representations from Central Balkans. Lamps with Early
Christian representations are considered in the context of transculturality
of Late Antiquity, as well as political and…[Read more]

This paper aims to examine models by which symbolism of light and lamp in
the Mediterranean region was manifested in the early Christian visual culture,
i.e. lamp representations from Central Balkans. Lamps with Early
Christian representations are considered in the context of transculturality
of Late Antiquity, as well as political and…[Read more]

Elements of Christian visual culture appeared in
various media in monumental and applied art during the late
antique period, from painted decoration in the catacombs,
through funerary monuments, to utilitarian objects such as
jewellery and lamps. The paper analyses the symbolic meaning
of fish and maritime motifs in the context of the late…[Read more]

On a number of pilgrimage objects from Late Antiquity, St Thecla, a highly revered saint, also known as Thecla the Protomartyr, is shown accompanied by St Menas, whose tomb in Egypt was the pilgrimage centre associated with healing miracles. The saintly couple appear in ad bestias compositions or in a simplified variant as two saints with a cross.…[Read more]

“Experience has shown pastoral caregivers that individuals do seem to cope better if they can “actualize” their spiritual experiences in times of crisis.”
A substantial amount of interest in spiritual experiences recently appears to be from a re-emergence of interest from the (unofficial) pastoral school of thought in psychology. For ins…[Read more]

Geertz, perhaps the most influential of the anthropologists, contends that symbolism and meaning are central to religion: “The view of man as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal, which has become increasingly popular both in the social sciences and in philosophy over the past several years, opens up a whole new approach not o…[Read more]

Einstein observed, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration of this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” As the p…[Read more]

This is a history of the Centre William Rappard, the first building designed to house an international organization in Geneva, and its art treasures. For nearly a century, these works of art and decorations offered by governments and institutions encouraged smooth diplomacy and fluent international negotiations in the fields of labour, trade and…[Read more]

“Every culture develops some kind of art as surely as it develops language. Some primitive cultures have no real mythology or religion, but all have some art – dance, song, design (sometimes only on tools or on the human body). Dance, above all, seems to be the oldest elaborated art….. Art is, indeed, the spearhead of human development, social…[Read more]