Fotografare Bisanzio

The workshop “Fotografare Bisanzio” is the second event within the research project “Picturing a Lost Empire”, whose goal is to study and catalogue the photographic collection of the Center for Documentation of Byzantine Art History (CDSAB) at Sapienza. The first public initiative that sprang from this project was the exhibition “Picturing a Lost Empire. An Italian Lens on Byzantine Art in Anatolia, 1960-2000”, held in Istanbul at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations - ANAMED (2018-2020). The photographs of Byzantine Anatolia exhibited in Istanbul were only a small selection of a much larger collection of images (over 35,000 items) now housed in the CDSAB, which resulted from fifty years of research travel by Sapienza Byzantinists in the Eastern Mediterranean. After the Istanbul exhibition, these field trips were the subject of a second exhibition in Rome, titled “Byzantine Syria in Photographic Documentation from the Twentieth Century to the Present”, held at the Museum of Classical Art at Sapienza, in collaboration with the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (2018-2019). The expeditions that inspired these two exhibitions were fundamental for several reasons. First, the photographs taken during the trips document the life of monuments which, over time, have often undergone radical changes or even destruction due to natural disasters and wars. Second, these journeys have served as training experience (Bildungsreisen) for young Byzantinists from Rome, who, for generations, have engaged with the artistic testimonies of distant lands and their anthropological context. In the mid-1960s, Géza de Francovich (1902-1996) organized the first explorations in the Armenian territories. Later, the most significant figure was undoubtedly Fernanda de’ Maffei (1917-2011), who, beginning in the 1950s, traveled throughout the Near East and in 1976 was appointed Professor of Byzantine Art History at Sapienza, holding the first chair of this discipline in Italy. Among her students of that time, we must remember Gianclaudio Macchiarella, Marina Falla, Gioia Bertelli, Alessandra Guiglia, and Claudia Barsanti. A subsequent phase of the research saw the participation of Antonio Iacobini, Enrico Zanini, Mauro della Valle, and Andrea Paribeni, together with Italo Furlan of the University of Padua. Until the turn of the 19th century, the History of Byzantine Art as an autonomous discipline did not exist. In Italy and in Europe there were only the so-called ‘Byzantine studies’. In 1901, however, La Sapienza established the first chair of Art History, entrusted to Adolfo Venturi (1856-1941). Venturi and his students began to study Byzantine monuments, which were considered an integral part of the development of Italian art during the Middle Ages. Among those students there was also a skilled young man, Antonio Muñoz (1884- 1960), who in 1905 was among the promoters of the first Byzantine art exhibition in Europe, held in the Abbey of Grottaferrata. He was also the first Italian art historian to travel to the Near East to study the monuments of Istanbul and Turkey. During his trip, Muñoz – who was a fan of the new photographic technique – began to gather a collection of images that would become part of his ‘Byzantine collection’. After a dynamic phase at the beginning of the 20th century, between the First and Second World Wars, research on Byzantine art in Italy took a different path. The rise of fascism marked an inversion of the trend: Byzantium was considered a negative model, one of decadence, compared to the glories of ancient Rome, and underwent demonization. Among those who escaped this trend was Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), the great American art historian living in Florence, who remained tenaciously pro-Byzantine. Among Italian scholars, on the other hand, there were very few who managed to maintain international contacts. The first was Pietro Toesca (1865-1959), a student of Adolfo Venturi and professor at Sapienza University. Then Sergio Bettini (1905-1986) from the University of Padua beginning in 1931 traveled in the East and, a few years later, wrote a pioneering handbook on this subject. At that time, in the absence of an official independent chair, Byzantine art continued to be taught in Rome and in Italy under the title of other disciplines, such as History of Medieval Art or Christian Archaeology. After the fall of fascism, the negative attitude towards Byzantium persisted for a long time in Italian culture. Beginning in the 1950s, however, a new chapter in Byzantine studies was written in Ravenna. Here, Giuseppe Bovini founded the “Corsi di Cultura sull’Arte Ravennate e Bizantina”. These annual conferences, held from 1955 until 1998, were continued under the leadership of Raffaella Farioli after Bovini’s death. Since the mid-1970s, the teaching of the History of Byzantine Art gained space not only at Sapienza but also in other Italian universities. The research and travels carried out by the various groups of scholars gave life to new photographic archives, which enlarged the network of historical archives, in existence since the end of the 19th century: photographic collections of scholars and university missions, collections of public institutions and foreign research centers. Today these form an important and rich heritage, but are not yet well known. The conference “Fotografare Bisanzio” aimed to draw attention to this heritage for Byzantium and the Near East, trying to respond to a critical need that can no longer be postponed.