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Papers by Ivan Drpić

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, no. 3, 2023

Sources for Byzantine Art History, vol. 3, The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium (c.1081–c.1350), ed. Foteini Spingou , 2022

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature, ed. Stratis Papaioannou , 2021

This chapter explores the overlap and synergy of visual art and text in Byzantine culture, with f... more This chapter explores the overlap and synergy of visual art and text in Byzantine culture, with focus upon inscriptions, in particular those with literary aspirations. Bringing together insights drawn from the disciplines of epigraphy and art history, the chapter introduces the reader to current approaches to the study of inscribed texts as an integral aspect of Byzantium’s literary and material cultures. Among the topics addressed are the interplay between the linguistic and extra-linguistic dimensions of the written word; the use of inscriptions to mark, enhance, and comment on artifacts and visual representations; and the agency of inscribed objects as vehicles of memory and self-representation. The discussion combines analyses of specific examples across a range of contexts and artistic media with reflections on methodology and proposals for future research.

Archaeometry, 2021

This article explores the materials and techniques of gilding in the Serbian wall painting of the... more This article explores the materials and techniques of gilding in the Serbian wall painting of the 13th and early 14th centuries. The investigation focuses on the pictorial decoration of the churches at Studenica, Mileševa, Sopoćani, Gradac and Banjska, all founded by members of the Serbian royalty. The murals of these churches originally featured backgrounds covered with gold leaf and patterned to mimic mosaic cubes-an expensive and fragile form of decoration of which only traces now survive. Research was conducted through a combination of in situ examination, sampling and laboratory microanalyses, with the aim to identify the composition of the materials used and to reconstruct the painters' working methods. The results reveal a highly unusual, even experimental, system of gilding. In all but one instance, the painters employed leaves of what is known as 'part gold'-a laminate produced by beating two sheets of gold and silver together, which was seldom applied to images on the wall and never on such a massive scale. The article's goal is twofold: first, to present new data on an important and innovative, yet poorly understood, form of decoration; and second, to lay the foundation for a comprehensive art-historical study of the Serbian gilded murals with simulated tessellation and their significance for understanding the changing dynamic between painting and mosaic in the later Middle Ages.

Inscribing Texts in Byzantium: Continuities and Transformations, ed. Marc Lauxtermann and Ida Toth, 2020

Gesta, 2018

The term enkolpion encompasses a broad category of objects — crosses, medallions adorned with Chr... more The term enkolpion encompasses a broad category of objects — crosses, medallions adorned with Christian imagery, and miniature reliquaries, among others — worn around the neck. Protecting the wearer and providing a constant focus for prayer, enkolpia were arguably the most personal and intimate of all devotional artifacts in Byzantium. They were embraced at confession and appealed to in circumstances of danger and anxiety, intensely scrutinized, caressed, and kissed. Yet the agency of these diminutive objects was not limited to their basic religious function. Enkolpia actively participated in various forms of social interaction. They could serve as gifts, collaterals, and safe-conducts and, most important, operate as physical extensions of their owners. This article explores how the Byzantines used and related to devotional pectorals. It has two objectives: first, to recover the significance of enkolpia as a distinct category of objects; and second, to shed new light on the material culture of personal piety as a critical setting for the formation of subjec-tivity in Byzantium.

Western medievalists have long questioned the notion that in the Middle Ages, as Jacob Burckhardt... more Western medievalists have long questioned the notion that in the Middle Ages, as Jacob Burckhardt famously asserted in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), “[m]an was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.” The sweeping teleological narrative of the rebirth of the autonomous self-conscious individual in the Renaissance, after its protracted medieval slumber, has been challenged by more nuanced accounts of the various ways in which personal identity and selfhood were constituted and expressed during the Middle Ages. In recent years, following Alexander Kazhdan's seminal, if contested, work on what he saw as a new sense of the individual in the Byzantine culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Byzantinists have joined the debate and begun to explore the issues of identity, subjectivity, and individuality. Thus Byzantine selves and their formations and representations have been examined in several contexts, including autobiography, rhetoric and letter writing, and the liturgy. This essay seeks to contribute to this project by looking at the largely neglected evidence of Byzantine dedicatory epigrams and the devotional artifacts they accompany.

Books by Ivan Drpić

by Ida Toth, Andreas Rhoby, Anna M Sitz, Canan Arıkan-Caba, Matthew Kinloch, Maria Tomadaki, Estelle INGRAND-VARENNE, Desi Marangon, Nikos Tsivikis, Roman Shliakhtin, Nicholas Melvani, Efthymios Rizos, Ivana Jevtic, Nektarios Zarras, Brad Hostetler, Georgios Pallis, Maria Lidova, Alex Rodriguez Suarez, Meriç T. Öztürk, and Ivan Drpić

The volume 'Materials for the Study of Late Antique and Medieval Greek and Latin Inscriptions in ... more The volume 'Materials for the Study of Late Antique and Medieval Greek and Latin Inscriptions in Istanbul' is a revised and updated edition of the booklet originally produced for the Summer Programme in Byzantine Epigraphy. This collection of 37 essays has been prepared by Ida Toth and Andreas Rhoby to provide a broad coverage of Constantinople's (Istanbul's) inscriptional material dating back to the period between the 4th and the 15th centuries. It is intended as a comprehensive teaching tool and also as a dependable vademecum to the extant traces of Istanbul’s rich late antique and medieval epigraphic legacy: https://austriaca.at/8370-9

This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centurie... more This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium. Spanning the period from around 1100 to around 1450, it focuses upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on works of art. Epigrammatic poetry, Professor Drpić argues, constitutes a critical – if largely neglected – source for reconstructing aesthetic and socio-cultural discourses that informed the making, use, and perception of art in the Byzantine world. Bringing together art-historical and literary modes of analysis, the book examines epigrams and other related texts alongside an array of objects, including icons, reliquaries, ecclesiastical textiles, mosaics, and entire church buildings. By attending to such diverse topics as devotional self-fashioning, the aesthetics of adornment, sacred giving, and the erotics of the icon, this study offers a penetrating and highly original account of Byzantine art and its place in Byzantine society and religious life.

by Foteini Spingou, Charles Barber, Nathan Leidholm, Thomas Carlson, Ivan Drpić, Alexandros (Alexander) Alexakis, elizabeth jeffreys, Theocharis Tsampouras, Mircea G . Duluș, Nikos Zagklas, Ida Toth, Alexander Riehle, Brad Hostetler, Michael Featherstone, Emmanuel C Bourbouhakis, Shannon Steiner, Efthymios Rizos, Divna Manolova, Robert Romanchuk, Maria Tomadaki, Kirsty Stewart, Baukje van den Berg, Katarzyna Warcaba, Florin Leonte, Vasileios Marinis, Ludovic Bender, Linda Safran, Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, Rachele Ricceri, Luisa Andriollo, Alex J Novikoff, Annemarie Carr, Marina Bazzani, Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Renaat Meesters, Daphne (Dafni) / Δάφνη Penna / Πέννα, Annemarie Carr, Alexander Alexakis, Jeremy Johns, Maria Parani, Lisa Mahoney, Irena Spadijer, and Ilias Taxidis

ISBN: 9781108483056 Series: Sources for Byzantine Art History 3 In this book the beauty and m... more ISBN: 9781108483056
Series: Sources for Byzantine Art History 3

In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries. The first part uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while the second puts a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting of the visual.

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, no. 3, 2023

Sources for Byzantine Art History, vol. 3, The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium (c.1081–c.1350), ed. Foteini Spingou , 2022

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature, ed. Stratis Papaioannou , 2021

This chapter explores the overlap and synergy of visual art and text in Byzantine culture, with f... more This chapter explores the overlap and synergy of visual art and text in Byzantine culture, with focus upon inscriptions, in particular those with literary aspirations. Bringing together insights drawn from the disciplines of epigraphy and art history, the chapter introduces the reader to current approaches to the study of inscribed texts as an integral aspect of Byzantium’s literary and material cultures. Among the topics addressed are the interplay between the linguistic and extra-linguistic dimensions of the written word; the use of inscriptions to mark, enhance, and comment on artifacts and visual representations; and the agency of inscribed objects as vehicles of memory and self-representation. The discussion combines analyses of specific examples across a range of contexts and artistic media with reflections on methodology and proposals for future research.

Archaeometry, 2021

This article explores the materials and techniques of gilding in the Serbian wall painting of the... more This article explores the materials and techniques of gilding in the Serbian wall painting of the 13th and early 14th centuries. The investigation focuses on the pictorial decoration of the churches at Studenica, Mileševa, Sopoćani, Gradac and Banjska, all founded by members of the Serbian royalty. The murals of these churches originally featured backgrounds covered with gold leaf and patterned to mimic mosaic cubes-an expensive and fragile form of decoration of which only traces now survive. Research was conducted through a combination of in situ examination, sampling and laboratory microanalyses, with the aim to identify the composition of the materials used and to reconstruct the painters' working methods. The results reveal a highly unusual, even experimental, system of gilding. In all but one instance, the painters employed leaves of what is known as 'part gold'-a laminate produced by beating two sheets of gold and silver together, which was seldom applied to images on the wall and never on such a massive scale. The article's goal is twofold: first, to present new data on an important and innovative, yet poorly understood, form of decoration; and second, to lay the foundation for a comprehensive art-historical study of the Serbian gilded murals with simulated tessellation and their significance for understanding the changing dynamic between painting and mosaic in the later Middle Ages.

Inscribing Texts in Byzantium: Continuities and Transformations, ed. Marc Lauxtermann and Ida Toth, 2020

Gesta, 2018

The term enkolpion encompasses a broad category of objects — crosses, medallions adorned with Chr... more The term enkolpion encompasses a broad category of objects — crosses, medallions adorned with Christian imagery, and miniature reliquaries, among others — worn around the neck. Protecting the wearer and providing a constant focus for prayer, enkolpia were arguably the most personal and intimate of all devotional artifacts in Byzantium. They were embraced at confession and appealed to in circumstances of danger and anxiety, intensely scrutinized, caressed, and kissed. Yet the agency of these diminutive objects was not limited to their basic religious function. Enkolpia actively participated in various forms of social interaction. They could serve as gifts, collaterals, and safe-conducts and, most important, operate as physical extensions of their owners. This article explores how the Byzantines used and related to devotional pectorals. It has two objectives: first, to recover the significance of enkolpia as a distinct category of objects; and second, to shed new light on the material culture of personal piety as a critical setting for the formation of subjec-tivity in Byzantium.

Western medievalists have long questioned the notion that in the Middle Ages, as Jacob Burckhardt... more Western medievalists have long questioned the notion that in the Middle Ages, as Jacob Burckhardt famously asserted in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), “[m]an was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.” The sweeping teleological narrative of the rebirth of the autonomous self-conscious individual in the Renaissance, after its protracted medieval slumber, has been challenged by more nuanced accounts of the various ways in which personal identity and selfhood were constituted and expressed during the Middle Ages. In recent years, following Alexander Kazhdan's seminal, if contested, work on what he saw as a new sense of the individual in the Byzantine culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Byzantinists have joined the debate and begun to explore the issues of identity, subjectivity, and individuality. Thus Byzantine selves and their formations and representations have been examined in several contexts, including autobiography, rhetoric and letter writing, and the liturgy. This essay seeks to contribute to this project by looking at the largely neglected evidence of Byzantine dedicatory epigrams and the devotional artifacts they accompany.

by Ida Toth, Andreas Rhoby, Anna M Sitz, Canan Arıkan-Caba, Matthew Kinloch, Maria Tomadaki, Estelle INGRAND-VARENNE, Desi Marangon, Nikos Tsivikis, Roman Shliakhtin, Nicholas Melvani, Efthymios Rizos, Ivana Jevtic, Nektarios Zarras, Brad Hostetler, Georgios Pallis, Maria Lidova, Alex Rodriguez Suarez, Meriç T. Öztürk, and Ivan Drpić

The volume 'Materials for the Study of Late Antique and Medieval Greek and Latin Inscriptions in ... more The volume 'Materials for the Study of Late Antique and Medieval Greek and Latin Inscriptions in Istanbul' is a revised and updated edition of the booklet originally produced for the Summer Programme in Byzantine Epigraphy. This collection of 37 essays has been prepared by Ida Toth and Andreas Rhoby to provide a broad coverage of Constantinople's (Istanbul's) inscriptional material dating back to the period between the 4th and the 15th centuries. It is intended as a comprehensive teaching tool and also as a dependable vademecum to the extant traces of Istanbul’s rich late antique and medieval epigraphic legacy: https://austriaca.at/8370-9

This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centurie... more This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium. Spanning the period from around 1100 to around 1450, it focuses upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on works of art. Epigrammatic poetry, Professor Drpić argues, constitutes a critical – if largely neglected – source for reconstructing aesthetic and socio-cultural discourses that informed the making, use, and perception of art in the Byzantine world. Bringing together art-historical and literary modes of analysis, the book examines epigrams and other related texts alongside an array of objects, including icons, reliquaries, ecclesiastical textiles, mosaics, and entire church buildings. By attending to such diverse topics as devotional self-fashioning, the aesthetics of adornment, sacred giving, and the erotics of the icon, this study offers a penetrating and highly original account of Byzantine art and its place in Byzantine society and religious life.

by Foteini Spingou, Charles Barber, Nathan Leidholm, Thomas Carlson, Ivan Drpić, Alexandros (Alexander) Alexakis, elizabeth jeffreys, Theocharis Tsampouras, Mircea G . Duluș, Nikos Zagklas, Ida Toth, Alexander Riehle, Brad Hostetler, Michael Featherstone, Emmanuel C Bourbouhakis, Shannon Steiner, Efthymios Rizos, Divna Manolova, Robert Romanchuk, Maria Tomadaki, Kirsty Stewart, Baukje van den Berg, Katarzyna Warcaba, Florin Leonte, Vasileios Marinis, Ludovic Bender, Linda Safran, Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, Rachele Ricceri, Luisa Andriollo, Alex J Novikoff, Annemarie Carr, Marina Bazzani, Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Renaat Meesters, Daphne (Dafni) / Δάφνη Penna / Πέννα, Annemarie Carr, Alexander Alexakis, Jeremy Johns, Maria Parani, Lisa Mahoney, Irena Spadijer, and Ilias Taxidis

ISBN: 9781108483056 Series: Sources for Byzantine Art History 3 In this book the beauty and m... more ISBN: 9781108483056
Series: Sources for Byzantine Art History 3

In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries. The first part uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while the second puts a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting of the visual.

Webinar series "The Byzantine Dialogues from the Gennadius Library," American School of Classical... more Webinar series "The Byzantine Dialogues from the Gennadius Library," American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 23 March 2021

"Skeuomorphs. Transmaterial Design in the Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean" International Confe... more "Skeuomorphs. Transmaterial Design in the Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean"
International Conference, Freiburg University, 17-19 November 2021

Covering, protecting, and adorning the body count among the most fundamental of human concerns, a... more Covering, protecting, and adorning the body count among the most fundamental of human concerns, at once conveying aspects of an individual's persona while also situating a person within a given social context. Wearable adornment encompasses materials fashioned by human hands (like fabric, metalwork, or even animal bones) and modifications to the body itself (such as tattoos, cosmetics, or hairstyles), which beautify the body while simultaneously conveying social, political, and protective functions and meanings. The wearable is thus the most representational and at the same time most intimate product of material culture. This conference seeks to expand our current understanding of the wearable in the Middle Ages. Current scholarship on the topic in Byzantine, western medieval, Eurasian art, as well as Islamic traditions tends to encompass clothing and jewelry, and is frequently medium-specific, with minimal regard to the interrelatedness of different aspects of appearance. On the one hand, work on medieval textiles has tended to approach questions of identity, consumption, and appearance by comparing textual sources and visual depictions with surviving textiles. The study of medieval jewelry, on the other hand, largely focuses on the classification and attribution of precious metal pieces from excavations and museum collections, as scholars make sense of pieces long removed from the bodies they once adorned. Tattoos, prosthetics, cosmetics and headgear are almost entirely absent in our understandings of medieval dress practices. This separation was not always so, however, and indeed nineteenth-century art historians such as Gottfried Semper integrated all aspects of bodily adornment in their considerations of the nature of ornamentation and surface decoration.