Ricerc@Sapienza

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been sporadically adopted as a visual support for single case studies, but have never been catalogued and remain mostly unpublished.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.