Dr. Barbara Baert (University of Leuven, Belgium)
Helena in Andria (Apulia, early 15th. Century). The Discovery of the True Cross between East and West
In the absys of the crypt of the Holy Cross Church in Andria (Apulia) four mural paintings are preserved with the story of Helena finding the True Cross: The arrival of Helena, Judas Cyriacus in the dry well, the Discovery and the Testing of the cross and finally the veneration of the erected cross. Little attention is made to this early fiftheenth century cycle (only: B. MOLAJOLI, La crypta di S. Croce in Andria, in Atti e memoria della società Magna Grecia. Bizantina-Medievale, 1, 1934, p. 25-35, p. 32, fig. 2.)
In this paper I want to examine:
1. The iconographical tradition of the murals in the context of the diffusion of the theme in the Italo-Byzantine south of Italy. In fact, this research can be an important counterpart to the always considered Tuscan monopoly of the theme during the fifteenth century (the so-called Firenze-Volterra,-Empoli-Arezzo cluster).
2. The appearance of the theme in connection with possible influences and impulses from the Balcan/Slavic aerea. These exchanges of the Helena-material between East and West during the later Middle Ages are underestimated in the research.
3. And finally, I will contextualise the Helena cycle in the context of the so-called cave-churches of Andria, which are related to the monastic-hermit-culture in Apulia.

Jens Baumgarten (University of Campinas, Brazil)
Italian Artists and Saints in Portuguese America: The Transformations of Post-Tridentine Concepts
This paper will examine various aspects of the migration, especially of Italian artistic and religious concepts, to the Portuguese America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this context it will be necessary to analyze the Catholic theory of visualization as well, focusing on different methods used to transform this visual system within the context of several colonial societies in the Americas. Emphasis will be placed on societies (particularly those in Brazil), with largely indigenous and/or African heritages, which possess their own visual systems that ostensibly highlight “idolic” images. The complex effects of these transformative processes lead to an analysis of the relationship between “internal” and “external” images, and also between image and word. This paper will present the ways in which word and image may be mutually translated,while also attempting to challenge the bipolar paradigm of a clearly marked opposition between the colonial and the “indigenous” gaze.

Dr. Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
Images of the Saracens in Italian Renaissance Art
This paper focuses on the encounter between the Christian and the Islamic worlds as it appears in Florentine churches. It explores images of the Muslims connected to the ideas of mission, conversion and crusade. Crusading sympathy in Tuscany, particularly in Florence, had a long history, going back to the twelfth century. The role of the mendicant orders, established in the great convents of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, was crucial in winning sympathy for the crusades. This tradition continued in the fifteenth century, when Florence openly voiced support for papal crusading efforts and Franciscan and Dominican preachers continued a tradition of mendicant crusade sermons. The mendicant movements developed special types of artworks, either paintings or sculptures in order to disseminate their religious ideals. The images discussed would include works by Giotto, Agnolo Gaddi, Taddeo Gaddi, Benedetto da Maiano from Santa Croce; Andrea da Firenze, Andrea Orcagna, Paolo Uccello, Domenicho Ghirlandaio from Santa Maria Novella.

Prof. Andreas Beyer (University of Basel, Switzerland)
Mount Vesuvius and Southern Italy: Artistic, Literary and Scientific Perception Around 1800
The talk will focus on the literary (Wilhelm Heinse, Johann Wolfgang Goethe,Karl Philipp Moritz), artistic (Jakob Philipp Hackert, Joseph Wright of derby, Pietro Fabris) and scientific (Sir William Hamilton) perception of the 'natural theatre' of Mount Vesuvius and the landscape of Southern Italy. Never before (and not afterwards) had Naples and the Kingdom of Southern Italy become the focus of artistic and scientific interests in such an intense way as around 1800.
The talk will try to show, how the different ways of perception, understanding and interpretation of this particular scenery interact, correspond and differ, thus also illustrating the specific conditions of the different genres."

Dr. Simona Cohen (Tel-Aviv University, Israel)
Sculpture in Gandhara – The Meeting of Hellenistic and Roman Art with the Sculpture of Northern India
Background
The meeting of the art in north-western India with Hellenistic art commenced with the followers of Alexander the Great, who founded an independent Greek kingdom in Bactria (presently Afghanistan) in the mid 3rd century B.C.. Their language was Greek and they preserved the religion, ritual and art of Greece. Beside the use of local materials it appears that their absorption of local traditions was minimal.
Western classical influence continued even after the fall of the Hellenistic kingdom in Bactria and the ascendance of the Kushana rulers , who infiltrated form north-eastern Asia in the 2nd century B.C.. Their art was exceptional for its syncretism, expressed, for example, in the combined depictions of the Greco-Roman pantheon, the Indian and Persian gods, and later on the image of the Buddha, on imperial coins. Under Kushana rule the local school of sculpture in the north-western area, called Gandhara, reached its ultimate achievements (2nd -5th c.). In Gandhara, which meanwhile became an important center of Buddhism, the earliest images of the Buddha were depicted under the influence of Greek and Roman models. The transition from aniconic to iconic depictions of the Buddha, appearing for the first time since his death in the 6th century B.C., took place simultaneously in Gandhara and in the sacred city of Mathura, where his image was depicted in an entirely different style following earlier Indian stereotypes.
Mercantile land routes between the Roman Empire and China passed through this area by way of Himalayan passages. Archeological findings indicate that Roman art objects already reached Gandhara in the 1st century, some of them presumably on their way eastward. Indian art objects, primarily of ivory and bone, were transported on the same routes to the Mediterranean basin.
Formal and Iconographic Analysis
The analysis will emphasize the unique synthesis formed by the Gandharan school of sculpture between Greco-Roman and local Indian traditions, in both style and iconography. Examples will include motifs of Greek mythology in relief and sculpture, Buddhist depictions, such as narratives of the Buddha's life and sculptured images of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, as well as Hindu themes.

Dr. Andreina Contessa (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
Art and Science in Medieval Catalonia: Ripoll Abbey and the Transmission of Culture.
Since the Carolingian period and the time of the Middle Ages, Catalunian scriptoria played a leading role in the transmission of Classical, Mediterranean and Eastern scientific knowledge to Europe. A tradition of scientific and astronomical studies flourished in the Ripoll monastery between the 10th and 12th centuries, as attested by documentary data and a few existing codices. These manuscripts testify to the state of scientific knowledge and learning at that time in the Marca Hispanica and its role in the transmission of culture from Al-Andalus to Europe, including ancient classical works translated from Arabic into Latin, not then available in France and Italy.
The miniatures in these codices are very interesting in that they remake illustrations related to different ancient traditions, reinterpreting, actualizing and adapting them to the local political and cultural context.

Dr. Adi Erlich, (University of Haifa, Israel)
Who is who: the Ambiguous Iconography in the Art of Hellenistic Maresha
The ancient city of Maresha, situated in the Judean hills, used to be a major town in the region of Idumea during the Hellenistic period. Excavations at the site have yielded rich finds, reflecting a prosperous eastern Hellenistic city from the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE. The artistic finds consist of terracottas, sculptures in stone, bronzes and wall paintings, which perform a provincial art associated with the Hellenistic koine, nonetheless having major local features. Most of the finds are domestic in character, whether coming from residences or from the numerous subterranean complexes quarried underneath them.
The Hellenistic period at Maresha brought together two cultures: the Greek culture with its well-defined and figurative visual system of deities, heroes, mortals and narratives, and a local culture with an ambiguous and variable iconography, which routed in the Levant for thousands of years. This syncretism causes uncertainties in the identification of the embodied figures. The most essential problem is regarding to deities and related figures which are thought to be syncretistic entities such as Heracles-Melqart or Aphrodite-Astarte, but also other depictions confused modern scholars with their indecisive identification, meaning and function. Besides the question how ancient people interpreted those visual symbols, we may wonder how they incorporated the unfamiliar Greek iconographical method into their old-new pantheon and ideas. As two different attitudes met together, which one took over in terms of iconography, title and substance? The town of Maresha, which existed continuously from the Persian to the Hellenistic period, can serve as a case study for these questions, having numerous iconographical finds in diverse mediums, and being an Eastern – Hellenistic city under Ptolemaic – Seleucid rule.

Dr. Anat Falbel (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
From Mediterranean to Atlantic: two synagogues in Brazil
The proposition of this text is analyzing the influence of Mediterranean motives and forms, in the construction of a modern Jewish architectural identity between the 20 and 30. The idea of a Jewish Modern Architectural Language rooted in Mediterranean motives and forms had been a subject of speculation between Jewish theoreticians and architects involved in the cultural Jewish renaissance as had been envisioned by Ahad Haam (1856-1927(for whom Erez Israel was the only possible source for this cultural Renaissance, as well as Martin Buber (1878-1965) who along with E. M. Lilien and B. Feiwel was the editor of the Juedischer Verlag (1902), one of the most effective means of invigorating and spreading the concept of Jewish culture. The German architect Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) was very much influenced by Buber's work - regarding the Bible as an expression of a reality which enclose the totality of life, and the idea of revelation when any natural event may be revelation for him who understands the event as really addressing him and is able to read its meaning for his personal life".
In addition, Buber and Mendelsohn were both concerned with the confronts of Jewish and Arab natives in Palestina, believing that the two people should lived together in a common country, reunited in a future common destiny. Mendelsohn had tried to develop and East -West vocabulary synthesis based on a dialogue between western developments and Arab culture and architecture through the study of the genius loci, justified in his text Palestine and the World of Tomorrow (1940), in which he considered the Temple as the synthesis of Mediterranean Culture, this last one understood as the intermediary of the world interests in the field of creativity, art and religion.
In fact, the idea of an architectural identity based on Mediterranean motives can be traced years before when a friend of Mendelsohn, the American historian and journalist Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) formulated what could be called a Jewish Modern Architectural Language, publishing in June, 1925, an article in the American Menorah Journal called "Towards a Modern Synagogue Architecture". Besides stressing the importance of the synagogue building in expressing the aspect of unity in the Jewish Philosophy and the notion of moral and physical cosmos, in this text Mumford justifies the use of Mediterranean forms, or the Byzantine style, as he called, because of his permanence for more than fifteen centuries in Palestine, coming from Egypt, to Asia Minor, lending his vocabulary to the new Christian communities from the IV to VII century and afterwards turning Muslim and being still alive in the little Arab villages with their cubic masses and domes. The problem is that although he surely intended to contribute to a modern synagogue architecture, we cannot be sure about his intentions in extending his speculation towards a Jewish Modern Architectural Language as a nationalist ideology reflection as was Mendelsohn case, since he seems the inheritor of a Christian intellectual lineage, traced since the Illustration, which believe in the role fulfilled by the Jews in spreading the monotheistic idea and their humanistic contribution to the European culture and civilization .
The analysis of Mumford's statements lead us to another character in this chain of set engagements - the biologist, who pioneered a sociological approach to the study of urbanization, Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), for whom the term culture encompassed his entire philosophical approach, and who understood quality of life as an interaction between spatial form and culture of people . Geddes thought and personality influenced Mumford's philosophy and writing. The two men maintained a fruitful correspondence since 1917 till Geddes's death in 1932. When designing the Hebrew University in Mont Scopus Geddes also returned to the Mediterranean forms, presenting his project to the Zionist Commission as the "version of Revelation
XXI-2 .well named as greatest of world outlooks - both historic westwards, & cosmic eastwards." Alluding to the biblical quotation, Geddes cleverly made use of the Jewish tradition concept of the Heavenly Jerusalem that turned into the Earthly to fulfill the nationalistic project.
The acceptance and use of the Mediterranean vocabulary of forms in Eretz Israel by the British architects and engineers can be understood as the result of the archeological discoveries of the ends of the XIX and beginnings of the XX centuries which confirmed the truthfulness of the Bible. At the same time, they were also testimonies of the Orient that could relate the present with a Biblical past, the purpose behind the settlement of the first English churches since the beginnings of the XIX century associated also with the Jewish conversion that would induced redemption and the establishment of Israel Kingdom.
The fact is that from Palestine this vocabulary spread between the 1920s and 1930s all around the world used in Synagogues and Jewish Institutional buildings. As an example, we would like to show a Brazilian Synagogue projected in 1928 that can be inserted in the movement of search for a national language in the arts and architecture between the two world wars.
Because of its masses volumes, lateral façades with narrow arched windows and Byzantine domes the Beth El Synagogue partakes Mumford 's definition of Byzantine style, or the oriental Arab Romantism - the neo Byzantine style as was defined by Kroyanker , in relation to the Hurva Synagogue (1864) and the Tifereth Israel (1876), and also to the Geddes and Mear's project for the Hebrew University (1919) and the Jerusalem Library (1926), and Austin Harrison's Museum Rockfeller (1929-1935) project . More than partaking Mumford's idea for a Modern Synagogue Architecture, the Beth-El building maintained a close dialogue with the Temple Tifereth Israel, built in Cleveland in 1924.
In November 1925, the Architectural Forum published an article by Richard Stanwood, about the newly built Temple Tifereth Israel in Cleveland, a project by Charles Greco, an architect who had built some other synagogues in the USA. In this article, the author after constructive and architectural descriptions, justified the formal choice as a consensus between the architect and the community deciding that the building should not use the usual styles, but the basic forms existing in those regions where the Jewish race had passed the period of its national existence. To achieve this result the architect used an harmonic assemblage of different motifs that present themselves"...not so oriental...and more Byzantine than anything else...", expressing the religious spirit and the essential unity of the Jewish faith.
An explanation that seems very much influenced used by Mumford's formulation in his "Towards a Modern Synagogue Architecture".
Therefore, we can perceive a true dialogue between the two texts, also remembering that Mumford used as examples the Temple Emanu-El of San Francisco, the Temple Euclid Avenue in Cleveland from 1912, and the Temple Tifereth Israel projected by Charles Greco.
In fact, we believe that Mumford's article was a result of a provocation made by his friend and mentor Geddes, who in a furious letter dated some months earlier (April/25) wrote to him about the project for the Yeshiva of America in New York, published in the B'nai Brith Magazine (National Jewish Monthly), in March, 1925, as representing the "style used in the ancient Palestine and following the Salomon Temple". Geddes suggested to Mumford to write some words to alert the public and his Jewish friends showing the way for a better project also asking if there weren't better architects than the ones responsible for the Ieshiva project. The first suggestion was immediately accepted by Mumford who wrote his article about the Synagogues, and as for the question, he answered that the Jewish nepotism was the responsible for those atrocities.
So we close the chain of architectural dialogues with the Temple Beth El in Sao Paulo inserted in the new modern movement of recuperation and reevaluation of the national languages between the wars, when Eretz Israel already recognized as the National Jewish Home was a concrete reference for their search.

Dr. Anat Gilboa (Northern Baroque Art Queen's University Kingston, Canada )
The Influence of Plato's Greater Hippias on Rubens's Venus Frigida
I will consider the influence of Plato's dialogue on Peter Paul Rubens's 1614 painting Venus Frigida. This study is significant because the association between Plato's writings and Rubens's painting has not yet been considered.
In Rubens's painting the nude Venus is crouching near Amor in a defensive expression. In front of them a Satyr is holding the Horn of Plenty and fruits symbolizing Ceres and Bacchus. The comic figure of the Satyr, provocatively stretching his tongue out against the freezing Venus, denies her from the goods he is holding. In Renaissance and Baroque art this scene illustrated the phrase 'Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus herself becomes lifeless and frigid,' mostly presenting a joyful Venus in the company of Ceres and Bacchus; the proverb meant to illuminate human moderation in sensual pleasures.
Rubens's Venus and the Satyr share similarities with the figures in Andrea Alciato's emblem: 'Adversus naturam peccantes' (Those sinning against nature). In this emblem a nude woman is shown relieving her bowels in a vessel meant to hold food. In front of her there is a sculpture of Satyr. The emblem's motto and image are complemented by a literary explanation declaring that, 'It is certainly shocking as a deed, but also a thing wicked to relate, if anyone were to empty the burden of his bowels in a choenix […]' The choenix was a vessel used to measure out daily portions of grain in ancient Greece. In Alciato's poem the vessel is utilized as a reminder to avoid what was believed to be human idleness. Alciato's image of the crouching figure and the satyr near her are icons censuring human behavior when it exceeds certain limits.
These images of Venus Frigida share similarities, exploring the dichotomy between aestheticism and moralism. However, I will argue that Rubens's Venus illuminates a contradictory conclusion to the moral teaching of Alciato's emblem. Rubens's Venus expresses despair because her needs are not met. This idea is not found in pictorial tradition before the Baroque but in Plato's work. I will conclude that in this painting Rubens expresses a unique understanding of classical philosophy. Plato's Greater Hippias was written as a dialogue between Socrates and Hippias where Plato assigns his own pragmatic attitude to Socrates concluding that the Beautiful is beneficial to human life as pleasure and therefore it (Pleasure/the Beautiful) must not be ignored.

Dr. Gabi Guarino (University of Haifa, Israel)
‘See Naples and Die’: Funeral Imprese in the Neapolitan Obsequies for the Spanish Habsburgs
Recent research has shown the extensive state sponsorship of imprese in early modern times functioning as effective conveyors of political messages. This paper will emphasize their usage in a particular historical situation neglected so far: the obsequies of Spanish monarchs in Naples during the seventeenth century. The paper will address two principal issues. The first concerns the comparative perspective between center and periphery. The question raised is if there were significant differences between the funerary imprese representing Habsburg monarchs in Naples from those in Madrid. Next, the paper will map gender differences present in the exemplary imprese of deceased queens and kings, trying to compare how close were Spanish and Neapolitan ideals of sex roles. In sum, this paper highlights a neglected case study of the Habsburgs' imagery of power, already acknowledged in their other possessions throughout Europe and the New World, which vindicates Naples' importance within Spanish civilization.

Lihi Habas (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
The Art of Imported Marble Chancel Screens and its Influence on Local Production in the Churches of Provincia Arabia and Palaestina Tertia: a Case Study
The churches of the Byzantine period within the frontiers of the provinces of Arabia and Palaestina Tertia were richly decorated by chancel screens that enclosed the liturgical space. The marble screens originated in the imperial quarries of Proconnesus whence they were transported by sea to various locales throughout the Mediterranean basin. The panels of the screens were decorated in relief with distinctive motifs bearing deep iconographic and theological significance which express the main tenets of the Christian faith: belief in the Messiah, victory over death and the promise of redemption to believers. Most of the decorations represent an identical idea to that expressed in the celebration of the Eucharist on the altar beyond the chancel screen.

Yiska Harani (Israel)
Great Saturday’s Holy Fire: Hellenic (and Other) Identities
The twain – liturgy and pilgrimage – often meet. Not infrequently the end or even the climax of a pilgrimage is a liturgical event or performance and, conversely, the latter may motivate the former.
Such is the case of the ceremony of the Holy Fire, which takes place in the Church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem on Great Saturday. The rite, which is attested for the first time in the ninth century, is peculiar to the Eastern churches. It takes place not at midnight, but at noon, in the light of day. There is no entry of the Easter candle, accompanied by the thrice repeated Lumen Christi, into the dark church (as in the Latin rite) but a very concrete, nonmetaphorical emerging of Hagion Phos (divine light) from the tomb of Christ, which is distributed to the throngs of congregants and pilgrims.
The role of the ceremony in the structure of the power-play of hierarchical relations (of the Eastern Churches and their heads, Muslim rulers and their Christian dhimmis – protected people, etc.) is indirectly attested to in the accounts of medieval and later pilgrims. However, as we move into the modern period, the traditional rite becomes the scenery of contemporary realities, shaping not only individual religious experience but also the social and communal identities of its eastern protagonists, namely the Greek, Armenian, Arab and other denominations.

Dr. Avital Heyman (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
Mediterranean Sirens Crossing the Mountains of Auvergne-Velay
Migrating from Greek mythology to scripture and ecclesiastical writing, sirens are best known for the perils they put on the road of Odysseus, and conversely, on that of the crucified Christ and on that of the pilgrim, two significations that Odysseus, the eternal voyageur tied to the mast, came to symbolize in the Middle Ages.
Long acknowledged in past scholarship, the siren motif was perceived of as a multilayered image whose negative Homeric connotations suited an even vaster range of destructive meanings, moral, social and political. More than sheer misogyny the hybrid sirens represent violation of social order, mainly that of the manly world. It is therefore no coincidence to find them dwelling in the biblical debauched town of Babylon, and in the land of Edom, destined to be destroyed, alongside hybrid centaurs, both in the Septuagint and in the Vulgate. These beasts gained much popularity throughout the Middle Ages, and embody the ultimate significance of evil in the medieval bestiary, as well as in wide-ranging exegetical literature.
This development may stand for the immense dispersion of the siren motif in Romanesque sculpture. Meant at an edifying purpose, sirens associated with urban destruction, lust, and avarice, signify the menace of sin they seduce humanity to fall into. The virtuous Christian, recognizing the long-enduring classical motif in its new Christian context, should take the paradigm of Odysseus in his Christological typology, and restrain from evil. Though constituting a rather popular motif of Romanesque sculpture in general, sirens seem to inhabit many of the churches of the Auvergne and the Velay regions of France, thus forming a conspicuous part of the local imagery. More than sheer enthusiasm for the antique, as past scholarship would have it, sirens seem to have chanted a very specific local chant in Aubergne-Velay. Constituting a major employed motif which testifies to a profound understanding of their contextual implications, they represent a multifaceted image denoting didactic, apothropaic, liturgical, social, and political messages.
It is the purpose of this paper to uncover the versatile imports of the siren antique motif in Romanesque Auvergne-Velay by pointing out their meticulous, perplexing delineation. The first part of this paper will survey the range of allegorical significances of sirens from Homer to Jerome and to medieval exegeses, followed by a description of sirens in Auvergne-Velay. Then I would like to suggest a new reading of the particular rendering of sirens in the small church of Pont-du-Château and in the pilgrimage church of Notre-Dame of Orcival, which may be a local historical significance.

Dr. Caroline Igra (University of Haifa, Israel)
Servants to Patronage, Witnesses to Change: Italian Artists Abroad and the Modern Cityscape
This study will offer three paradigms of the unusually propitious relationship between cityscapist and patron which emerged in the early modern period, and continued well into the nineteenth century, developing side by side with the simultaneously developing cities themselves. Antonio Canaletto’s ten year tenure in England, occupied as it was with recording the vast physical changes to which London was then subject, certainly set the stage for the work of future foreign artists. His success inspired the later cityscape careers of Italian artists Giuseppe Canella, as noted from his ten year career in Paris in the 1820s, and Giuseppe de Nittis, in his fifteen year residence in the City of Light beginning in 1868.
Witness to periods of great physical change, these three Italian artists were called upon to harness their abilities as cityscapists to the aspirations of high-ranking patrons, monarchs and various official governing bodies. They were required not only to document the physical uprooting to which these cities and citizens were exposed but even more significantly, to provide some kind of “revelatory” imagery. The hope of their well-connected patrons was that such art would transcend its role as documentation, and capture the spiritual hope for the bright future to which those witnessing these urban projects aspired. Ideally, this forward-looking imagery would justify those vast programs of destruction and reconstruction to which urban metropolises - such as London and Paris - were subjected in pursuit of the goals of modernization and of meeting the needs of future generations.

Meital Itzkovich (University of Haifa, Israel)
Italian Influences in 16th Century Sevillian Painting: The Example of Luis de Vargas
Seville in the sixteenth century regarded itself as the "New Rome," a vision encouraged by the great wealth entering the city from the Americas. This wealth prompted a large number of art commissions in the various media, and the city attracted numerous Spanish and foreign artists eager to be commissioned by an affluent patron. A good many of these artists were painters influenced by Italian Mannerism, directly or indirectly, and their works introduced Italianate features to Sevillian painting of the mid-sixteenth century. One of the most prominent and fascinating of these painters was Luis de Vargas.
Vargas, a Sevillian born painter (c. 1506-1567), spent a considerable period of his life in Italy. There are various versions regarding the dates of his stay there but according to recent studies it probably took place between 1527-1534 and 1541-1549. In 1550 he is documented back in Seville where he stayed and worked until his death. To his late Sevillian period belong the few paintings by him known to us today, and these attest to direct contact with the Mannerist painting in Rome and Florence in the 1530's and 1540's, especially that of Perino del Vaga, Giorgio Vasari and Francesco Salviati. This contact is best illustrated in his paintings in the Seville Cathedral which combine Italian influences with a Spanish touch.

Dr. Katrin Kogman-Appel (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
Italy and Hebrew Manuscript Painting in Catalonia
The paper discusses Italian iconographic influences in Catalan painting. Echoes of Italian art have been observed in the past mainly in stylistic analysis and have been linked to the activity of the workshop of Ferrer and Arnau Bassa. Iconographic influence from Italy has been dealt with as an extension of this stylistic development. The paper first makes a distinction between iconographic influence prior to the Bassas and the latter's interest in Italian style. Second, it illuminates the traces of Italian iconography against the background of the cultural, political, and social history of the Jews in both Catalonia and Italy and in terms of the Christian-Jewish cultural dialogue.

Dr. Diana Kottler (Beit-Berl College, Israel)
Eclecticism in the Art of Apulian Port Cities: the Case of Monopoli
The paper will discuss monuments and works of art created in Monopoli during the Middle Ages which display elements drawn from different places in the Mediterranean as well as north of the Alps. Monopoli's active seaport must have been instrumental in transmitting artistic influences and in creating a local dialect which reveals international connections.
Dr. Shula Laderman (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) Biblical Cosmology in Art and Liturgy of Early Christianity
The Apostolic Constitutions, is a Christian liturgical collection believed to have been compiled in Syria in the fourth century based on Jewish liturgical sources. The Christian Topography is an illuminated Byzantine manuscript thought to have been written and illustrated by Constantine of Antioch in the sixth century. Both works use a specific homiletic approach, in order to present a cosmological typology that emphasizes the connection between the act of Creation in the book of Genesis and the structure of the wilderness Tabernacle in the book of Exodus. The verses used by both works provide a concrete understanding of a schematic model of the world whose origin is apparently in early Jewish Hellenistic writings. The miniatures appearing in the extant copies of the illuminated Christian Topography translate these biblical accounts into visual images and create a pictorial blueprint of the structure of the world.
The proposed lecture aims to demonstrate that the liturgy of the Apostolic Constitutions may well have been the avenue through which Jewish Hellenistic biblical cosmological ideas were transferred to the author/illustrator of the Christian Topography.

Prof. Alexei Lidov (Research Center for Eastern Christian Culture, Moscow, Russia)
Mediterranean Hierotopy. Performances with Miraculous Icons
This paper is based on the concept of ‘Hierotopy’ (Ierotopia), meaning the creation of sacred spaces and the historical research that defines this special form of human creativity. Hierotopy spans the traditional fields of art history, archaeology, anthropology, and religious studies. Each particular sacred space may be examined as a new type of historical source which itself is a complex of various arts and cultural activities. From this point of view, architectural setting, pictorial decoration, music context, lighting or fragrance, as well as numerous other rituals, might be considered as elements of this complex structure, and subordinated to the major project of a particular sacred space. The Hierotopic vision and approach may reveal a new layer of subjects. It concerns iconic images created in space. The combination of some images in a specific church, or one image in ritual context could present another iconic image, not formally depicted on panels or walls, but made implicit in a given sacred space between or around the actual pictures. This presentation discusses ‘performances’ involving miraculous icons in the Hellenic world. A characteristic Byzantine example is the Tuesday rite with the Hodegetria of Constantinople, which was the most venerable ‘spatial icon’ in the East and the West from the twelfth to fifteenth century. One might find the roots of this phenomenon in the cult of miraculous images in Ancient Greece, which presents similar approaches and archetypal structures. Furthermore, some patterns of Ancient Greek and Byzantine traditions survived in the religious practice of the modern period.

Prof. Ricardo de Mambro Santos (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy)
Migrations of Memory: The Invention of Beauty in Karel van Mander
This paper will propose a selective reading of some important aspects of the Northern Art Tradition as it had been exposed in Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck – "The Book of Painting" – (published in Haarlem in 1604) in order to analyze its theoretic structure, its specific hermeneutic strategies and its problematic connections with Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Illustrious Painters, Sculptors and Architects, (first published in Florence in 1550 and widely changed in 1568). In fact, the first part of the paper will be devoted to the investigation of the different modalities through which the artistic parameters established by the Italian Renaissance tradition had been absorbed – and strategically modified – by the Dutch and Flemish artists during the Cinquencento, with special attention to Van Mander's method of translating some categories from the Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder, such as "Beauty" and "Variety", and also from the Vasarian pages, in order to understand Van Mander's pluralistic conception of "Manner". For this reason, the second part of the paper will analyze the ways by which the Mediterranean "Manner" had been transmitted, assimilated and transformed in the works produced by the two most representative Masters of the Netherlandish tradition: Pieter Bruegel (1528-1569) and Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). The paper will attempt to verify the centrality of the "mnemonic" paradigm in Van Mander's Art Theory: a fascinating journey into a labyrinthine artistic tradition from the mimetic aspirations of its Renaissance masters to the metamorphic ambitions of the Mannerism painters.

Dr. Naomi Meiri-Dann (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
Twelfth Century North Italian Mosaic Pavements and Pilgrimage to Rome and the Holy Land
Mosaic pavements were laid, between the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the thirteenth century in many North Italian churches. It seems that these works share a common and unique feature: they all display man’s actual life on earth. The paper will examine these mosaic pavements in relation to the geographic spread of the churches in which they were laid, along the roads leading the pilgrims, as well as the Crusaders, to Rome and/or the Holy Land. The intrinsic meaning of the Christian’s way of life portrayed in these mosaics is intensified by their presence along the actual road traveled by the believer who experiences a physical as well as a spiritual journey.

Dr. Mati Meyer (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
“The Window of Testimony”: A Sign of Physical and Spiritual Conception
Based on the ancient motif of “the Woman at the Window”, Middle Byzantine art has devised a new iconographic version, “the Window of Testimony.” The new formula, which appears primarily in illuminated manuscripts, represents biblical female figures such as Sarah and Bathsheba framed by a window while making known their forthcoming conception of Isaac and Salomon, respectively. The annunciation alludes not only to the physical process of becoming pregnant, but also serves, first and foremost, to sum up abstract popular ideas and beliefs of post-iconoclastic Byzantine culture and society, one of them being the humanity of Christ. This idea is mainly propagated through the theme of the maternity of the Virgin. And, indeed, the visual rendering of the female figures of the Bible framed by the window in Byzantine art displays iconographic parallels with the image of Mary. Subsequently, these biblical images serve to translate Christological and Marian themes of conception into real signs that were easier to grasp by the wider public.

Dr. Edina Meyer-Maril (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
The Flat Roof – Mediterranean, Oriental or Modern?
The paper will discuss the different interpretations of the flat roof in Israeli architecture since the mid nineteenth century until today, reflecting changing architectural concepts and cultural identities.

Dr. Rachel Milstein (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
Alexander the Great in a Muslim Garb
The story of Alexander the Great makes an integral part of Islamic (mostly Persian) epics, which form and express the medieval Islamic ideas of royalty. His biography, originally based on Greek sources, was modified and enriched by Muslim authors to create an image of a man of science and an avid seeker of eternal life, as well as a world conqueror and a just ruler. Alexander was often depicted in miniature illustrations of the "Book of Kings", Sufi metaphorical poesie, accounts of the marvels of the world, and even eschatological texts.
My paper will present the many aspects of this composite image, its sources, and the various aspects of Islamic civilizations that are manifest through his illustrated adventures.

Prof. Alexander Nagel (University of Toronto, Canada)
A Statue of Christ from the Holy Land in Renaissance Italy
The period around 1500 saw the rise of a restricted but conspicuous trend of all’antica statues of Jesus in bronze and marble on the altars of churches in Italy. Free-standing statuary in bronze or marble was a very rare sight in churches at this time, and not only due to reasons of expense. The free-standing statue, especially in valuable materials, was associated with pagan idolatry throughout the Middle Ages. The most frequent visualization of the “idol” throughout the medieval period was in the form of a statue in the round. And yet in humanist culture all’antica statuary was also considered one of the highest forms of art. To some artists and humanists it seemed only appropriate to represent Jesus in the heroic form of a statue, especially as Jesus himself lived in Roman antiquity. To some reformers, the unitary form and idealizing rhetoric of the free-standing statue also offered a welcome antidote to the over-elaboration and indeterminacies of contemporary painting. And yet the form carried highly suspect, even demonic associations.
This paper studies efforts undertaken in Italy to make the form “safe” for Christian purposes. It will concentrate on one understudied bronze statue of Jesus that created a sensation in Venice in the years around 1500, impelling such artists as Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano, Alvise Vivarini, and others to use it as a model in their own works. The paper argues that the statue carried such authority because it was understood as a version or iteration of a “first” bronze statue of Jesus believed to have been made in the lifetime of Jesus, and famously recorded by Eusebius in Caesarea, present-day Banyas. This statue thus carried the authority of a “true likeness”—its all’antica qualities were part of its claim to original status. We thus see a convergence of a humanist culture that saw the forms of antiquity as a path to cultural renewal and a reform-minded culture that aimed to return to the original, pure forms of early Christianity. It thus allows us to consider more famous works, such as Michelangelo’s Minerva Christ, in a new light.

Prof. Attilio Petruccioli (University of Bari, Italy)
History, Structure and Landscape in the Mediterranean Region.
For some scholars landscape is a poetical emotion, for others is an aesthetical experience connected to vision. I believe that landscape (as architecture) is structure i.e. a system of elements hierarchically ordered and in dialectic interdependent relationship.
The complexity of such system ( imagine a valley in a pre-industrial moment with its settlements, routes, agricultural implants etc ) can be interpreted only through the simplificative concept of type and its transformation in time or typological process.
The reconstruction of the typological process is an unavoidable necessity prior to any intervention of design on a given landscape.
In spite of the complex stratifications of civilizations that have transformed its landscape, forms and uses, I believe that two main moments of this process have create the Mediterranean character of our region: the first phase of the formative cycle corresponding to the installations and routes on the ridges and the fourth phase of the formative cycle corresponding to the systematic formation of the large plains. The ridge phase with its typical natural morphology is the real backbone of the landscape, the plains phase with the geometric division of the land, the installation of the Hellenistic and Roman modules and grids has left a network of formal relations still readable in the present landscape.
Reading Italian and Middle Eastern landscapes with the methodological tools of the Italian School of Saverio Muratori the paper discusses the strong relationship between morphology of the land and form of the landscape, in all its scalar components from territory, to settlement to architecture.

Prof. Elisheva Revel-Neher (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
The Voice, the Cloud, the Absence: Figurations of the Non-Figurable in Jewish Art
Belief in the Unique, Invisible God is the essence of Jewish philosophy and theology. In Jewish Art, the clash between figuration and the purposeful prohibition of representation leads to various tentavives of pictorial interpretation. From anthropomorphic details to visual translations of the biblical text, this lecture will re-examine the origins and development of the “non-figurations” of the Divine in Jewish Art. It will focus on works of art, mainly mosaics and illuminated manuscripts, from Eretz-Israel to Spain, between the third and the thirteenth centuries. Comparisons will be drawn with Christian and Moslem art.

Dr. Jochai Rosen (University of Haifa, Israel)
The "Classical Portrait": Another Facet of Classicism in Early Modern Northern Europe
We are quite used to seeing early modern European portraits of distinguished people depicted against the backdrop of a classical column and a dramatic curtain. Perhaps the most striking example would be Hyacinthe Rigaud's "Portrait of Louis XIV" (1701, o/c, 279 x 190 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris). Some portraits include a classical niche topped with a conch which might even include a statue; others might depict the sitter accompanied by a classical bust or a relief. The richness of the classical world was discovered in Northern Europe during the Renaissance. The true or presumed knowledge of classical culture soon became a status symbol and it is quite clear that these portraits were meant to arouse a sense of the 'antique' and to present the sitters as versed in the classical. In view of this classicism it is not surprising to realize that most 'classical portraits' were painted north of the Alps. Indeed some of the most important contributors to the development of this type of a portrait into a leading formula in European portraiture were northern European painters, among them Hans Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck and Reynolds. The purpose of this paper is to examine the development and appeal of this portrait formula in Northern Europe as an expression of the admiration of classical culture, especially in comparison with similar portraits created by Italian contemporaries such as Sebastiano del Piombo, Titian, Moroni, Batoni and others.

Dr. Victoria Sabetai (Research Centre for Antiquity, Academy of Athens, Greece)
Nuptial Imagery at the Age of Pericles: Attic Red-Figured Vases at the Benaki Museum, Athens
The Benaki Museum houses a collection of red-figured vases, some of which are associated with nuptials through their vase-shape and iconography. In this paper I present the vases themselves and discuss the visual language and iconographic conventions of Attic wedding scenes. Although the established scheme focuses on the emblematic depiction of the bridal couple, certain vase-painters enrich the standard version with pictorial motifs referring to wifely and manly ideals. The imagery concurs with the highly idealized Parthenoneian art and reflects the importance of the marital union under the Classical Democracy in Athens.

Prof. Wilhelm Schlink (Kunstgeschichtliches Institut der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany)
Jacob Burckhardt and the end of the nostalgia for Italy in German art-history
In the beginning of his career as author and teacher Jacob Burckhardt was a convinced exponent of the nostalgia for Italy, his nostalgia was conceived by Winckelmann and his contemporaries in the second half of eighteenth century. But when the older Burckhardt repeated his lectures on 'newer art from 1550 on' in the 1780s he had lost his heart rather to the Netherlandish Art of the seventeenth century. The criterion of Italian Renaissance Art as a norm for the art of all times was replaced by the democratic impulse of the northern genres (genera, Gattungen). In late nineteenth century Burckhardt stood not alone with this metamorphosis.

Dr. Ada V. Segre (University of Milan, Italy)
Messengers from Mount Carmel: the Carmelites and Sacred Sites
Mount Carmel constitutes an interesting landscape, which underwent a process of sanctification, and its image, both real or transfigured through idealization, was replicated throughout the world by the Carmelite Order. A similar and far better-known case is undoubtedly Jerusalem, a fundamental presence in Western culture and art. Sacred sites on Mount Carmel became the object of pilgrimage, mostly associated with the prophet/saint Elijah (and to a minor extent Elisha), and to the Virgin Mary of the Carmel. The sacralization of precise spots on Mount Carmel possibly resulted from the combination of a natural scenery with distinctive features, and the popularization of its image by the Carmelite Order.
This paper presents the locations on Mount Carmel which became associated with Carmelite presence,comprising the areas of the "Cave of Elijah", "Stella Maris", Wadi Siach, Ysfia, and the Mochraka. In addition to attempting to trace their history, it explores the reasons which led to the identification of precise sites with events narrated in the Old and New Testament. Pre-existing traditions, the presence of religious hermit communities, and those elements in the landscape which might have been perceived as special are discussed here.
Echoes of Mount Carmel first as a lost religious landscape, then rediscovered as such, are frequent in Western culture and art. The location of new Carmelite settlements has always been guided, and still is, by the evocation of the original Mount Carmel. In this view, Mount Carmel appears to be subject to a process similar to Jerusalem in its transposition to the Sacri Monti, replicas of the sacred city as the scene of the Passion in the Alpine landscapes of northern Italy. This paper presents examples of the transposition of Mount Carmel sacred landscape into Europe, and tries to provide an evaluation of its influence as a cultural landscape.

Ms. Adi Shelach
Classical Motifs in Venetian Art: A Painting by Benedetto Diana
Due to her extensive marine trade in the Mediterranean and to the direct contact with eastern cultures, Venice gradually became a multi-cultural city, with a unique openness to Greek language and tradition. Deprived of a classical past of their own, the Venetians acquired, collected, documented and even plundered residuals of antiquity and early Christianity, integrating them into the public sphere to shape a self-identification of the city as a "Second Rome". During the 15th century to the identity of the Stato da Mar was added another identity, that of the Stato da Terraferma.
This paper will suggest a reading of the iconography of the Assumption of the Virgin painted by Benedetto Diana in Crema, against this cultural background. Crema's strategic significance at the western borders of the Venetian territory can be recognized in the painting. Another source of influence was the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in Venice in 1499. A temple of Venus Physizoa, minutely described in this Antiquarian romance, supplied, as I will suggest, a source for the architectural scenography of the painting. The hybrid language of the book, combining Latin, Greek and the vernacular, might have influenced Diana's style as well.

Mr. Guy Tal (Indiana University at Bloomington)
Universal Language and the Overlooked Gestures of Melancholy in Goya’s Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
One of the cultural stereotypes that unites Mediterranean inhabitants is blunt gesticulation during conversation. These gestures either accentuate the emotional state of the speaker or amplify the content by adding conventional signals for certain words or statements. In that way, an Israeli tourist in Italy, for instance, may understand and express mood and even content through gestures alone when conversing with locals. Achievement of such communicative capability was exactly the goal of eighteenth-century philosophers and humanists who endeavored to canonize a universal language; that is, to globalize Europe by using the single language of hand gestures.
In this paper I will demonstrate the Universal Language through Goya’s most famous and intriguing print, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Capricho 43), which depicts the artist dreaming of fantastic apparitions, and its two preparatory drawings. The second drawing bears the inscription Ydioma universal (“Universal Language”), correctly interpreted by some scholars as referring to the idea of gestural language. Quite surprisingly, scholars did not correlate the inscription with its substantial demonstration: the gestures made by the figure of the artist in the images themselves.
Goya, whose interest in Universal Language was artistic as well as personal due to his deafness, used instructional books about the “Language of the Hand” as the basis for the gestures displayed in the three versions of Capricho 43. Through comparisons with the illustrations in these books I will identify these gestures as melancholic. Then, by providing another possible source for the print, I will interpret the artist’s melancholy as the stimulus of his fertile imagination. Capricho 43 was originally intended to be the frontispiece of the Caprichos series and, as such, it conveys one of Goya’s purposes in generating this series: to proclaim, by depicting himself employing Universal Language, that his art is universal and can be read by everyone.

Dr. Daniel M. Unger (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
The Yearning for the Holy Land in Seventeenth-Century Pastoral Depictions of Erminia and the Shepherds
In 1602, Giovanni Battista Agucchi, a senior official in the papal court as well as a theoretician of art, wrote to the well-known Bolognese painter Ludovico Carracci and asked him to paint the pastoral scene of Erminia’s encounter with the old shepherd and his three sons in the village on the banks of the Jordan River. The scene was taken from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, a Virgilian epos of a Christian crusade that ended with the conquest of Jerusalem from the Saracenes. In his letter Agucchi gave a detailed account of how the scene should be portrayed, stressing among others that the scenery should resemble a Palestinian village near the Jordan River. In so doing Agucchi went beyond Tasso’s text, which was rather obscure when dealing with the description of the village and its surroundings. Agucchi’s meticulous account specified the types of trees commonly found in these parts of the Mediterranean, such as, olive, laurel, and palm trees, insisting that they be incorporated in Ludovici’s rendering of the village.
Ludovico delivered his painting, today part of the Real Palacio de la Granaja collection at San Ildefonso, to Agucchi in 1603. Agucchi was not happy with the results, as we learn from his complaints in a letter addressed to Annibale, Ludovico’s younger cousin. Ludovico’s version was the first of many depictions of this specific scene in the seventeenth-century. See, for example, Domenichino’s or Guercino’s paintings. In fact, this scene became more popular in artistic representations than any of the great battles described in the epos.
In this paper I focus on the reasons why this scene became so popular in seventeenth-century painting. I believe that the answer can be found in the fact that the painting bore a political message relating to contemporary events, such the opening up of the new world and the struggle against heresy in Catholic Europe. I argue that Agucchi chose the scene that [seemingly] represents Heaven on earth, in order to shift the attention of Catholics from the new world back to where it all started – the Holy Land.

Yael Young (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
Girls Playing Auloi in the Hellenistic World
Terracotta figurines are among the ubiquitous uncovered findings at archaeological sites. The lecture will focus on terracotta figurines of the type that depicts a girl playing auloi. The starting point of the lecture is an unpublished figurine of the Israel Museum collection. The lecture will discuss the stylistic and iconographic
aspects of the type in general, and of the figurine in particular.
The comparison of the figurine with other statuettes that depict the same subject, points to a broad-spectrum of artistic styles and to a diversity of representations. We can identify local styles that stem from working methods of certain ateliers. Thus, an attempt will be made to point to possible connection between manufacturing centers.
The iconographic examination will consider both other visual representations and literary sources. The archaeological contexts of the figurines will be taken into account too. The lecture will end with a discussion of their meaning, role and function.