This book treats the dome and apse paintings pirated from a small Greek Orthodox church isolated in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus in the years following the Turkish invasion of 1974. It lays out a remarkable threefold effort of restoration. First is their restoration, through their rescue from the shadowy underworld of the illegal art market, to public awareness and admiration, as described in Bertrand Davezac's introduction. Second is their physical restoration undertaken by Laurence Morrocco, who received the paintings cut by the pirates into thirty-eight segments which had lost their curvature. Morrocco developed techniques of unprecedented sophistication to return the flattened segments to their original shape and then to fit them together so nearly perfectly that the beauties of the work, e.g., the rhythmic waves made by the wings of the angels in the outer ring of the dome, have been preserved. He precisely details here his uncharted course over four years, capturing its aspect as a perilous adventure. A third restoration unfolds in Annemarie Weyl Carr's text as the paintings are restored to their historical and artistic context. Richly informative about the life and meaning of Byzantine art, the paintings have proved to be even more important in casting light on the culture of Cyprus in the thirteenth century, when Crusader conquerors, native Cypriots, and Middle Eastern immigrants joined in a vibrantly creative, symbiotic society. The book shows how crucial it is that we protect artifacts in their own shape and context, restoring them to the worlds that made, used, loved, and found meaning in them.

A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered, the Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus

Carr, Annemarie Weyl

Morrocco, Laurence J.

Arts & Photography

Menil Collection

160 pages with 107 illustrations 33 in color. Illustrated wraps. Introduction by Bertrand Davezac. Published in Association with the Menil Foundation.

A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered: The Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus

History & Criticism

The Menil's collection of Byzantine and related icons is widely regarded as one of the most important in the United States. Comprising more than sixty works, many acquired by Dominique de Menil in 1985 from the noted British collector Eric Bradley, the group spans twelve hundred years, from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries, and encompasses a number of distinct cultures, including Greek, Balkan, and Russian. In this volume, the first publication to survey this diverse collection, leading scholars explore the history and meaning of these remarkable works, and their continuing power to surprise and impress. 
Orthodox Christianity developed in the Near East during the Byzantine Empire, in time yielding eleven autocephalous communions of which the Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, and Bulgarian Orthodox churches are the largest today. Each maintained the tradition of icon painting rooted in Byzantium but inflected it in distinctive ways. Transcending time and place through a delicate balance of tradition and innovation, these images of saintly or divine figures were designed to imprint their holy subjects on the human mind. Though largely dismissed as backward by Renaissance and Enlightenment Europeans, icons captured the imagination of early modernist painters, and contemporary audiences appreciate them as aesthetic objects.

Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from The Menil Collection

The Menil Collection

Professor Carr is concerned here with the devotional arts of the Byzantine world in the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The first set of studies deals with groups of illuminated manuscripts of the twelfth century, mostly connected with the Eastern Mediterranean, while the second focuses directly on Cyprus and its rich Orthodox visual heritage in the later Middle Ages. As Byzantium’s strongest bridgehead to the Crusades and its heir in the Levantine balance of power, the island of Cyprus retains an exceptionally rich legacy of Byzantine culture and artifacts. At the same time, as the seat of the most enduring Crusader state, it offers unparalleled testimony to the interplay of Greek and Latin cultural traditions as they accommodated and resisted one another under the pressure of Mamluk, Mongol, and Ottoman expansion.

Cyprus and the Devotional Arts of Byzantium in the Era of the Crusades (Variorum Collected Studies)

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Carr, Annemarie Weyl. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Carr, Annemarie Weyl

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Carr, Annemarie Weyl. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered, the Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus

A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered: The Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus

Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from The Menil Collection

Cyprus and the Devotional Arts of Byzantium in the Era of the Crusades (Variorum Collected Studies)