On April 17, Thomas F. Mathews, John Langeloth Loeb Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at New York University, will give an illustrated lecture on “Armenian Art on the International Stage,” at Columbia University, The Armenian Weekly reported.
The event is sponsored by the Armenian Center at Columbia University and the department of art history and archaeology in association with the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).
Mathews will explain how recent scholarship on Armenian art is re-positioning the subject in the grand “Christian Crescent,” which stretched from Alexandria around Palestine and Syria to Constantinople. On this cosmopolitan international stage, Armenia kept pace with the latest developments in architectural design, manuscript painting, church decoration, and the art of icons. The image theory developed by Vrtanes of Dvin was well in advance of Greek theologians Leontius of Neapolis and John of Damascus.
Mathews is an acknowledged expert in the field of early Christian and medieval religious art, with a focus on Armenian church architecture and manuscript illumination. He has held many prestigious fellowships and honors – with the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Samuel H. Kress, J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, among others—and is the author of numerous books on Byzantine art, including The Clash of Gods and The Byzantine Churches of Istanbul. Earlier he curated an exhibition spanning the whole medieval Armenian tradition of manuscript illumination under the title “Treasures in Heaven” at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, with accompanying catalogue and collected essays published in Treasures in Heaven. His most recent book, Byzantium: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, was published by Yale University Press in 2010.
The event is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception.
