From Byzantium to the Low Countries: via Italian cities such as Venice or Siena, through Crete, or Burgundy, or by way of Germany and Eastern Europe, what are the roads followed by icons and art objects in their passage from East to West? How was the Platonic-Byzantine concept of the image received in Europe and how was it transferred into the more Aristotelian sphere of Western medieval culture? How in their turn did the intermediaries influence this process of transmission from East to West? What contribution did Byzantine images make to the long history of the elaboration of Europe? This book tries to answer some of these questions through the articles of leading experts in the field. It is also the summary of a conference organized by BOZAR and The A.G. Leventis Foundation, which took place at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels on 18 January 2015.
Representing the Unrepresentable: Lessons in Image-Thinking
Paul Dujardin and Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel
Paths to Europe: From Byzantium to the Low Countries. Influences, Differences, and Intermediaries
Bernard Coulie
Ars devotionis: Reinventing the Icon in Early Netherlandish Painting
Till-Holger Borchert
An Icon among the Statues: The Early-Modern Reception in the Southern Low Countries of the Sienese Painting of Notre-Dame de Grâce in Cambrai
Ralph Dekoninck
Angelicae Cohortes: Notes about Armoured Saints and Angels from Byzantium to the Low Lands
Mario Scalini
Engaging Emotion: Beauty, Suffering and the Body of the Crucified Christ between East and West
Myrto Hatzaki
Looking at Icons and Contracts for their Commission in Fifteenth-Century Venetian Crete
Maria Vassilaki
The Mother God of Tenderness: The Introduction and Dissemination of an Iconic Image in Early Netherlandish Art
Katrien Lichtert
The Court of Burgundy and Constantinople
Jacques Paviot
Under the Gold: A Database of Underdrawings and Material Analyses on Sienese Paintings. Connections and Dissimilarities in Painting Techniques Across Centuries and Countries
Anna Pelagotti
Epilogue: Byzantium and Sienese Art
Damien Wigny
Biographies
