ANAMED Junior Fellow and a PhD student at the University of Cologne, Tatiana Bardashova introduces an important work in the ANAMED Library catalogue: Antony Eastmond’s Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium: Hagia Sophia and the Empire of Trebizond. She also has some very good news for the Byzantine history enthusiasts and followers of ANAMED events…
I would like to draw your attention to one of the many special books in the ANAMED Library collection: Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium: Hagia Sophia and the Empire of Trebizond. The book was written by a well-known expert on the history of Byzantine art, Antony Eastmond. The author gives an original interpretation of the political situation in the Empire of Trebizond, the Empire of Nicaea, and the Despotate of Epirus, which proclaimed themselves the successors of the Byzantine Empire after its fragmentation as a consequence of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Eastmond focuses on the church of Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, which was built in the middle of the thirteenth century and is still one of the finest surviving Byzantine imperial monuments of its period. He looks at the architectural, sculptural, and painted decoration of Hagia Sophia and uses the church and its decoration to examine questions regarding Byzantine identity and imperial ideology in the thirteenth century.
I would like to take this opportunity to announce also an exciting exhibition with an emphasis on the Empire of Trebizond. Curated by the author of the above-mentioned book, Antony Eastmond, and organized by ANAMED, the exhibit is on view in the ANAMED gallery until September 18, 2016. The exhibition presents many unique and rare pictures of Trebizond’s monuments (including the Hagia Sophia) from the archives of some of the most famous specialists in the history of Trebizond, such as Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, Gabriel Millet, David Talbot Rice, Fedor Uspenskij, David Winfield, and others. You can learn more about the Hagia Sophia and the Empire of Trebizond from Eastmond’s book in the ANAMED Library collection.
Book details:
Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium: Hagia Sophia and the Empire of Trebizond, by Antony Eastmond. Series: Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs 10. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004. XXI, 208 pp.
Click here for the Library link.
Click here for other works by Eastmond in the ANAMED Library.
Click here for the exhibit in the ANAMED Gallery.