Since the 1960s Sapienza University has supported an intense activity of research on Byzantine art history in the Eastern Mediterranean (Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Cyprus), mainly based on the survey of the extant monuments. During several field trips, the participants produced more than 35,000 pictures and other materials (diaries, letters, maps), which were stored in the Centro di Documentazione di Storia dell'Arte Bizantina (CDSAB) of the Department of Art History and Performing Arts. Up until now, these documents have been sporadically adopted as a visual support for single case studies, but have never been catalogued and remain mostly unpublished.
This research has two main purposes:
a) to provide a classification and a preliminary web catalogue of this invaluable, yet disregarded, resource, in order to allow its scientific fruition
b) to contextualise these materials in the broader scenario of Byzantine studies, and to stress their primary importance as witnesses to the history of conservation of the Eastern Mediterranean monuments.
In fact, the CDSAB materials cover countries (e.g. Syria) whose geo-political and human shape has changed dramatically in the last few decades. The archive can therefore offer a crucial contribution to the knowledge of monuments, which have been altered, damaged, or totally lost. The earliest documentation consists of the personal archives of Géza de Francovich (1902-1996) and Fernanda de' Maffei (1917-2011), who taught at Sapienza, and were amongst the protagonists of Byzantine studies in the last century. A careful analysis of this section would help to acknowledge properly the international role of the Italian scholars in this field. The research group is composed of specialists who can guarantee a wide range of interdisciplinary competences: Byzantine art history and archaeology, art historiography and travel literature, Byzantine philology and civilisation, history of photography and digital archives.
The arrangement of an informative web platform (in Italian and in English) would provide a totally open access to an outstanding virtual resource for Byzantine studies, in a way that has no precedent in Italy and is comparable to some of the most advanced web archives worldwide (United States, France, Great Britain).
Moreover, the CDSAB documents would facilitate the monitoring of the state of conservation of an innumerable quantity of monuments and archaeological sites, currently situated in territories that cannot be easily reached. The expected results of this study would certainly become also a useful instrument for all those institutional bodies, which could plan to undertake conservation processes. In fact, one more aspect is worth mentioning as far as the international impact of this research is concerned. A large part of the territories visited and documented during the field-trips has lately undergone significant alterations or destructions. Therefore, the outcomes of this study will be expectedly made available for the Ministries of Cultural Heritage of the interested countries, to be used for their future activity of conservation and documentation.
In addition, the successful achievement of the project will have valuable - and durable - consequences in terms of the circulation and diffusion of the knowledge of Byzantine art history. It would also provide a remarkable contribution to the analysis of the cross-cultural exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean territories during the Middle Ages and the modern times. In fact, it must be emphasised that most of the Byzantine monuments which were explored and documented by the Sapienza team have survived through the centuries thanks to the later intervention of the Islamic civilisations. It would be impossible, therefore, to de-contextualise these monuments from their post-Byzantine history. This specific aspect will be carefully taken into consideration during the research.
The availability of a web platform, as well as the organisation of events in connection with the research, such as a conference or workshop, would reaffirm the importance of international and intercultural relations, and would reinforce the consciousness of the existence of a shared cultural identity for the Mediterranean countries.