Union Académique Internationale

Project nº40a, adopted in 1985

In May 1983, during a meeting in Athens, the members of the Committee for the History of Byzantine Art of the International Association of Byzantine Studies agreed on the necessity of the publication of a Corpus of Byzantine Monumental Painting. The guidelines, agreed upon by such authorities as Manolis Chatzidakis (Athens), the general secretary of the AIEB and president of the Committee, who was the initiator of the project, Vojislav Djurić (Belgrade), Marcell Restle (Munich), Robin Cormack (London), Jacqueline Lafontaine Dosogne (Louvain), Elka Bakalova (Sofia), Mara Bonfioli (Siena), Athanasios Papageorgiou (Nicosia) and others, were the following: The time limits of the Corpus extend from the mid-seventh to the end of the fifteenth century. The Corpus would include not only monuments painted on Byzantine territory, but also related material strongly influenced by Byzantine art, included in manuals such as the History of Byzantine Painting by Victor Lazarev. The monuments of each country would be published in different series, by province. The text would include a detailed description of the different layers of the frescoes or mosaics, without iconographical or stylistic comments. The inscriptions would be published separately for each monument. In monuments which also contain later frescoes or mosaics, these would be mentioned summarily. The text would be illustrated with a large number of photographs and accompanied, by architectural drawings showing the exact location of each subject. The volumes of the Corpus would appear in the native language and in English. The purpose of the Corpus was obviously to make known all the existing material, including that not easily accessible and in danger of destruction, and not only that of high quality and already well known. The project was submitted by Prof. Chatzidakis to the Union Académique Internationale, which decided to place it under its auspices and entrust its coordination to the Academy of Athens. The first countries involved in the project were Greece, Italy and Cyprus. In 1997 the Research Centre for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art of the Academy of Athens published a volume on the frescoes of the island of Kythera (Cerigo) by M. Chatzidakis and I. Bitha, in Greek, which appeared also in an updated English translation in 2003. There followed volumes on monumental painting in Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace by E. Papatheophanous-Tsouri in 2016 and on the Ionian Islands by various authors in 2018, both in Greek. Editions in English may follow when the financial situation of Greece is improved. In 2010 the Centre also published an Repertory of Monumental Painting on Mount Athos from the tenth to the seventeenth century by N. Toutos and G. Fousteris. A volume on the eighteenth and nineteenth century is due to follow. A Corpus of the few extant Byzantine-style frescoes in Sweden appeared in two instalments, although Sweden was not represented in the 1983 conference in Athens, by the late Professor Elisabeth Piltz (1988; 2008). The Italian Corpus had a promising start by an ad hoc committee headed by Professor Mara Bonfioli (Siena, then Rome I), but progresses very slowly. A volume on Umbria appeared in 2012, but another one on the Marches had to be postponed after the death of the author, Professor Patrizia Angiolini Martinelli. Professor Bonfioli was in the meantime succeeded by Professor Antonio Iacobini (Rome I), and a volume on the frescoes of Calabria is ready since 2017. The former Director of Antiquities of Cyprus Athanasios Papageorgiou, who was to edit the volumes on the island, desisted about twelve years ago, and the Cyprus project is now at a standstill. Bulgaria has published a couple of volumes on its frescoes but without adhering to the norms of the Corpus, , e. g. as far as the time limits and the inclusion of one region in each volume are concerned. A conference was organised by the Academy of Athens in 2003, in order to assess the progress made until then and to encourage other institutions to join the project. The conference was a success and representatives of several countries manifested their interest.