‘Intelligible Beauty’: Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery

The field of Byzantine jewellery (4th–15th centuries) is a rapidly expanding one and a large amount of important research has been conducted within the last ten years, both by scholars on the continent and in America. The intention is to draw together the many strands involved in this research and to publish them in accessible form. The papers fall into three discrete areas. There is the issue of centralisation as opposed to regionalisation and workshop activities within the major metropolitan centres of the eastern empire – Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria. A further theme to be explored is how and whether it is possible to identify individual workshop production through both art-historical and technical analysis. The second section of papers focuses on the key questions of acculturation and mimesis between Early Byzantium and neighbouring cultures such as the Avars, Lombards and Visigoths; and the third section looks at analogous issues between the medieval Byzantine empire and the Slavs, Rus, Turcs and Fatimids. A number of the papers examine the relationships, both technical and stylistic, between Middle Byzantine and Islamic jewellery which will hopefully lead to a greater understanding of the cultural interconnections between these two great medieval cultures.